The Routledge Companion to Medieval Iconography 9781315298375

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The Routledge Companion to

Medieval Iconography

An Ashgoto Book

Edited by

Colum Hounhane

The Routledge Companion to Medieval Iconography

Sometimes enjoying considerable favor, sometimes less, iconography has been an essential element in medieval art historical studies since the beginning of the discipline. Some of the greatest art historians - including Mâle, Warburg, Panofsky, Morey, and Schapiro - have devoted their lives to understanding and structuring what exactly the subject matter of a work of medieval art can tell. Over the last thirty or so years, scholarship has seen the meaning and methodologies of the term considerably broadened. This companion provides a state-of-the-art assessment of the influence of the foremost iconographers, as well as the methodologies employed and themes that underpin the discipline. The first section focuses on influential thinkers in the field, while the second covers some of the best-known methodologies; the third, and largest section, looks at some of the major themes in medieval art. Taken together, the three sections include thirtyeight chapters, each of which deals with an individual topic. An introduction, historiographical evaluation, and bibliography accompany the individual essays. The authors are recognized experts in the field, and each essay includes original analyses and/or case studies which will hopefully open the field for future research. Colum Hourihane received his PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, in 1983 for a thesis on the

iconography of Gothic art in Ireland, part of which was subsequently published as Gothic Art in Ireland 1169-1550: Enduring Vitality (2003). He was deputy director of the Witt Computer Index in the Courtauld Institute until 1997 before becoming director of the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, where he was until retirement in 2014. He has edited over twenty volumes of art historical studies and has singleauthored five volumes. Among the latter are The Processional Cross in Late Medieval England: The Dallye Cross (2005) and Pontius Pilate, Anti-Semitism, and the Passion in Medieval Art (2009). A fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, he was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Irish Academy in 2015.

The Routledge Companion to Medieval Iconography

Edited by Colum Hourihane

Routledge Taylor & Francis Croup LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Colum Hourihane; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Colum Hourihane to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-4724-5947-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-29837-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo

by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Cover Title Copyright CONTENTS List offigures and plates Preface Biographical notes on the contributors Medieval iconography, an introduction Colum Hourihane PART I The great iconographers 1 Andrea Alciato Denis L. Drysdall and Peter M. Daly 2 Ripa, the trinciante Cornelia Logemann 3 Adolphe-Napoléon Didron (Paris 1867Hautvilliers 1906) Emilie Maraszak 4 Louis Réau Daniel Russo 5 Émile Mâle Kirk Ambrose 6 Abv M, Warburg: iconographer? Peter van Huisstede 7 Fritz Saxl: transformation and reconfiguration of pagan gods in medieval art Katia Mazzucco

8 Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968) Dieter Wuttke 9 Charles Rufus Morey and the Index of Christian Art Colum Hourihane 10 Hans van de Waal, a portrait Edward Grasman 11 Meyer Schapiro as iconographer Patricia Stirnemann 12 Michael Camille’s queer Middle Ages Matthew M. Reeve PART II Systems and cataloguing tools 13 The anthropology of images Ralph Dekoninck 14 Classifying image content in visual collections: a selective history Chiara Franceschini 15 Library of Congress subject headings Sherman Clarke 16 Iconclass: a key to collaboration in the digital humanities Hans Brandhorst and Etienne Posthumus PART III Themes in medieval art 17 Religious iconography Marina Vicelia 18 Liturgical iconography Karl F. Morrison 19 Secular iconography Harald Wolter-von dem Knesebeck 20 Erotic iconography Madeline H. Caviness

21 The iconography of narrative Anne F. Harris 22 Political iconography and the emblematic way of seeing Gyórgy E, Szonyi 23 Picturing the stars - scientific iconography in the Middle Ages Dieter Blume 24 Medicine’s image Jack Hartnell 25 Patronage: a useful category of art historical analysis? Elizabeth Carson Pastan 26 Royal and imperial iconography loan A, Holladay 27 The iconography of architecture Elizabeth Valdez del Álamo 28 Heraldic imagery, definition, and principles Laurent Hablot 29 Medieval maps and diagrams Diarmuid Scully 30 The iconography of gender Sherry C, M, Lindquist 31 Feminist art history and medieval iconography Martha Easton 32 The iconography of color Andreas Petzold 33 Flowers and plants, the living iconography Celia Fisher 34 The iconography of light Sharon E. J. Gerstel and Michael V/. Cothren 35 The visual representation of music and sound

Susan Boynton 36 The other in the Middle Ages: difference, identity, and iconography Pamela A. Patton 37 Animal iconography Debra Higgs Strickland 38 Monstrous iconography Asa Simon Mittman and Susan M. Kim Index

Figures and Plates

1.1 In nothos (Padua, Tozzi, 1621) 600. By permission of University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections. 1.2 Gratiam referendam (Paris. Wechel, 1534) 9. By permission of University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections. 1.3 Detail of one of the figures in the border (upper left side) from Sheldon’s Spring tapestry, now in Hatfield House. The legend reads “In Consilio” (Deliberation). Late sixteenth-early seventeenth centuries. Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane. 2.1 Title page from Cesare Ripa, Iconologia 1603 (University Library of Heidelberg). 2.2 “Caritas” from Ripa, Iconologia 1603, 64 (University Library of Heidelberg). 5.1 Émile Mâle, c. 1928. Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, EI13 (2832). 6.1 The Warburg brothers. Aby Warburg is on the far right: his four brothers are Paul, Felix. Max, and Fritz. Image courtesy of the Warburg Institute. 6.2 Gertrud Bing, Aby Warburg (center), and Franz Alber (right) in Rome. Image courtesy of the Warburg Institute. 6.3 Screen 47 of the Mnemosyne Atlas, last series of the Mnemosyne Atlas. 6.4 Diagram showing two small nuclei from screen 47 of the Mnemosyne Atlas. Matteo de’Strozzi refers to Warburg’s text (Warburg 1892): “Pathosformel” is an important research motif throughout his work. 7.1 Fritz Saxl in the reading room of the Kulturwissenschaftliche

Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg, 1926-1927, unknown photographer. Image courtesy of the Warburg Institute, London. 7.2 The Nike-Mithras type, F. Saxl, Mithras: Typengeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Berlin, 1931), figs. 31-36. 7.3 The Mundus-Annus-Homo diagram, Isidore’s De responsione mundi et de astrorum ordinatione, Günther Zainer Augsburg 1472: A. Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke (Leipzig, 1920), fig. 292. 7.4 Photograph showing Saint Terome, dating to the mid-fifteenth century, hand-colored woodcut, first stamped “Bibliothek Warburg/Hamburg 20/114 Heilwigstrasse” (old building of the library: before 1926), and afterwards stamped in London “The Warburg Institute” (no address: no affiliation with the University of London: 1933-1944) and catalogued according to the new section “Religious Iconography.” The Warburg Institute. 7.5 Photographic exhibition in the reading room of the KBW for Saxl’s lecture “The Expressional Gestures of the Visual Art.” 1931. Image courtesy of the Warburg Institute. London. 8.1 Panofskv and his students from Hamburg University on an excursion to Westphalia from Tulv 16 through Tulv 20, 1932. Panofskv is sitting on the right side with his wife Dora in a white blouse behind him. For the identification of the other figures see Korrespondenz. vol. I (as in note 1), 366 (Fig. 34), and additions in Wuttke, Kumulationen (as in note 1), 33. Photo courtesy of Archive Wuttke. 8.2 Panofskv in his study at the Institute for Advanced Study. spring 1966. Panofskv’s gesture is inspired by the portrait of Abbot Suger in the abbey church of St, Denis. Paris. Photo courtesy of Archive Wuttke. 8.3 Panofskv in his Hamburg academic gown at Harvard, 1957, when he was awarded an honorary doctorate. Photo courtesy of Archive Wuttke. 9.1 Charles Rufus Morey. Image courtesy of the Index of Christian Art.

9.2 The Index of Christian Art showing the two paper files. On the right side is the subject file, consisting of the alphabetically arranged twenty-eight thousand subject headings, while on the left side is the photographic file. 10.1 Hans van de Waal. Unknown photographer, date unknown, Leiden University Libraries. 10.2 The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis. Rembrandt (fragment. 196 x 309 cm, originally c. 550 * 550 cm), Stockholm. Royal Academy of Fine Arts (on loan to The Riiksmuseum, Amsterdam). 10.3 Portraits of the Syndics of the Amsterdam Clothmasters’ Guild , Rembrandt, 1662. oil on canvas, 191.5 x 279 cm. The Riiksmuseum. Amsterdam. 10.4 Le Petit Orfèvre, also known as The Goldsmith. Rembrandt, etching. 7.7 * 5.6 cm. first state of three (B123, 1655), Leiden University Libraries. 11.1 Detail of the trumeau at Moissac showing prominent swollen udders of the lioness. Moissac, Abbaye Saint Pierre. Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane. 11.2 Edward Young carrying the corpse of his stepdaughter, Elizabeth Temple, by Pierre Antoine Auguste Vafflard. Oil, 238 x 192 cm, c. 1804, Le Musée d’Angoulême, Image courtesy of Le Musée d’Angoulême, Thiery Bias. 12.1 Club advertisements. The Michael Camille Papers, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago Box 14, “Picturesque Gothic” fileimage courtesy of Matthew Reeve. 12.2 Luxuria, Amiens West Front. Image courtesy of the Courtauld Institute of Art, Tames Austin Collection. 12.3 Trumeau, Souillac. Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane. 12.4 Trinity College, Cambridge MS B 11.22, f. 73r, Image courtesy of Trinity College, Cambridge. 12.5 Tanuary page. Très Riches Heures. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 13.1 Michelozzo di Bartolomeo (attr.l and Pagno di Lapp Pertigiani,

tabernacle for the SS. Annunziata (c. 1340), 1448-49, Florence, SS. Annunziata. 15.1 Christ being nailed to the cross, Gerhard Remsich, c, 1538-9, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (c. 276-1928). Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane. 15.2 Christ’s Entry into lerusalem. Western facade of the Abbey Church of St.-Gilles-du-Gard, c. 1120-1160. Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane. 16.1 Iconclass system volume 2-3, p. XIX: this subtle manner of ordering concepts was not supported by the data. 16.2 A man blowing his own horn while giving alms (Georgette de Montenay, Emblèmes ou devises chrestiennes fedition: Frankfurt 1619], emblem 90). 16.3 (a) Saint Martin gives part of his cloak to a beggar. From Hours of Simon de Varie. Paris, c. 1455. (The Hague, Koninkliike Bibliotheek MS 74 G 37, fol. 80r). 16.3 (b) Beggar on crutches (print made by Pieter Langendiik, after a design by Pieter Barbiers I. second quarter eighteenth century). 16.4 Screenshot from the Iconclass browser - at: http://iconclass.org/rkd/55C21. 16.5 Screenshot from the Iconclass browser - at: http://iconclass.org/rkd/46A212. 17.1 Master Radovan, Nativity, lunette above the entrance to the Cathedral of Trogir. Croatia, thirteenth century. Image courtesy of Marina Vicelia. 17.2 Mosaic program in the apse of the Eufrasius’s basilica in Porec, Croatia, sixth century. Image courtesy of R. Kosinozic. 17.3 The Virgin of Mercy (Madonna della Misericordia). Church of San Tomà, Venice, Italy, fourteenth/fifteenth century. Image courtesy of D. Descouens. https://commons.wikimedia.Org/wiki/File:San Tom%C3% AO Madonna della Misericordia sec. XV.jpg. 17.4 The Triumph of Death, a detail of the fresco on the facade of

the Oratorio dei Disciplini, Clusone, Italy, fifteenth century. Image courtesy of E. Senza. 19.1 Ebstorf Map, c. 1300, northern Germany (modern copy of the original destroyed in 1943). © Kloster Ebstorf, Klosterkammer Hannover. 19.2 Schmalkalden, Hessenhof: (a) view of the Iwein Rooms, north, (b) welcoming man at the entrance, both drawings by P. Weber, “Die Iweinbilder aus dem 13. lahrhundert im Hessenhofe in Schmalkalden.” Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst 12 1900-1901, 7384, 113-20. 19.3 Maienfeld. Burg Brandis, Upper Tower, Bar Fight, first third of the fourteenth century, I. R. Rahn, “Zwei weltliche Bilderfolgen aus dem 14. lahrhundert und 15. lahrhundert,” Kunstdenkmäler der Schweiz. Mitteilungen der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft für Erhaltung historischer Denkmale, 2 (1902), 1-14. 19.4 Ostermiething, Old Rectory. Cockaigne, wall painting around 1470/80. Image courtesy of Harald Wolter von dem Knesebeck. 20.1 Andromeda, Aratus, Phaenomena interpreted by Claudio Germanico, Carolingian Palace School, Aachen, c. 804. Leiden University Library, Ms Voss. Lat. 079. folio 30 v detail initial C. Photograph licensed by Leiden University Library. 20.2 Old man and young girl kissing: (a) with wvvern to the left, (b) with serpent to the right, corbel at the roofline of the apse, Santa Maria, Uncastillo (Aragon), after 1135. Image © Antonio García Omedes. 20.3 Intercourse for male health, Aldobrandino of Siena, Régime du corps, chapter 7, North France (probably Lille), c. 1285: London, British Library Ms Sloane 2435, folio 9 v, detail. © The British Library Board, All Rights Reserved. 20.4 Herr lakob von Warte bathing, with female attendants, Manesse Codex, Heidelberg University Library Cod.Pal.germ. 848, folio 46 v. Photograph licensed by Heidelberg University Library. 20.5 Man and woman engaged in sex play, corbel from the Church

in Kirknewton, Edinburgh, National Museum of Scotland. H. KG 33. Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane. 20.6 Entwined male and female couple. The Psalter-Hours of Ghuiluys de Boisleux, Arras, c. 1245, Morgan Library Ms M730, folio 222 r, detail. Photo licensed by The Morgan Library & Museum. 21.1 Simone Martini. Annunciation, 1333. Tempera and gold on panel. Florence, Uffizi Gallery. Image courtesy of Scala/Minesterio per I Beni e la Attivita culturali. Art Resource, New York. 21.2 Opening sequence. Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Tean de Meun, 1353. Bibliothèque de Genève. Ms. Fr. 178. Image courtesy of HIP/Art Resource, New York. 21.3 Facade of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Terusalem, c. 1149 (Palestine, today Israel), 1855-1860. Image courtesy of Adoc-Photos/ Art Resource, New York. 21.4 Medieval comb. Scenes of Courtly Love, c. 1320. Ivory, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (A.560-1910). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 22.1 Emblem XC, “Loue and feare are chiefest things./That stablish Scepters unto kings.” Guillaume de la Perrière/Thomas Combe, A Theater of Fine Devices. London. 1614. Illustration courtesy of Google Books. 22.2 Composite picture showing Pisanello’s Portrait of Emperor Sigismund I (1433, black chalk and pen on paper. Musée du Louvre, Paris): Albrecht Dürer’s Portrait of Emperor Sigismund I (1512, oil on lindenwood. Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg); and Albrecht Dürer’s Emperor Maximilian I (1519, oil on lindenwood. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). 22.3 The Wilton Diptych (1395-99), tempera on wood, London, National Gallery. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 22.4 Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Allegory of Good Government, details (1338-40), fresco, Siena, Palazzo Pubblico. 22.5 The Great Stove (1545), majolica. Gdansk, Artus Court. Image

courtesy of Gyorgy Szönyi. 23.1 Gemini, Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Ms. Voss. Lat. O 79. fol. 16v. 23.2 Andromeda, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms. Lat. 5239, fol. 219v. 23.3 Aquarius, London. British Library. Harley Ms. 2506, fol. 38v. © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. 23.4 Perseus, Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Ms. 1036, fol. lOr. 23.5 Eridanus und Figura sonantis canonum, Vienna, österreichische Nationalbibliothek. Cod. 2352, fol. 19v. 24.1 (Detail) Leprous priests receiving instruction from a bishop. from the Omne Bonum of Tames Le Palmer, c. 1360-75, England. London. British Library. MS Royal 6 E VI. vol. 2, fol. 301r. © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. 24.2 Muscle Man, Male and Female Genitalia, Presentations of the Fetus in the Womb, and Pregnant Disease Woman, from the socalled Wellcome Apocalypse, a medical miscellany from c. 1420, Southern Germany. London. Wellcome Library. MS 49, fols. 37v and 38r. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library. 24.3 (Detail) Diagram of the Eve, from a medical miscellany including the “Book of Macharias on the Eye Called Salaracer or Secret of Secrets.” last quarter of the fourteenth or first quarter of the fifteenth century. England. London, British Library. MS Sloane 981, fol. 68r. © The British Library Board, All Rights Reserved. 24.4 Entries for Brassica silvatica (wild cabbage or wild cole?). Basilisca (sweet basil), and Mandragora (Mandrake), from the Herbal of Pseudo-Apuleius in a pharmacopeial compilation, second half of the twelfth century, England. London, British Library, Harley MS 5294, fols. 42v and 43r. 24.5 Saint Elzéar Curing the Lepers, c. 1373, Apt (Provence). Marble. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. Image courtesy of the Walters Art Museum. 25.1 Bible presented to Charles the Bald, The First Bible of Charles the Bald (Paris, BN, MS lat. 1, fol. 423r), Tours, c, 845. Image

courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 25.2 Dedication frontispiece from the Liber Vitae of New Minster (London, BL, Stowe MS 944, f. 6r), Westminster, c. 1031. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 25.3 The Visual Colophon from the Toledo Cathedral Bible moralisée (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.240, fol. 8r), Paris, c. 1220-30s. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 25.4 Book owner kneeling in prayer. Matins of the Hours of the Virgin, Psalter-Hours “of Yolande of Soissons” (The Pierpont Morgan Library. New York, MS M.729, fol. 232v), Amiens, c. 1290. Image courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum, New York. 26.1 Silver denier of Charlemagne. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Monnaies. Médailles et Antiques. Between 801 and 814. Mainz (?). Photo © Genevra Kornbluth. 26.2 Charles V, holding the scepter and the hand of justice, kneels before Dagobert’s throne as the archbishop of Reims places the crown on his head. Coronation Book of Charles V. London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. VIII, fol. 59r. 1365, Paris, Photo © The British Library Board, All Rights Reserved. 26.3a Charles the Bald seated on his throne looks into the heavens. Codex aureus of St. Emmeram. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München, Clm 14000, fol. 5v. 870, Court School of Charles the Bald (location unknown). Photo: courtesy of Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München. 26.3b The twenty-four elders adore the lamb. Codex aureus of St. Emmeram. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München, Clm 14000, fol. 6r. 870, Court School of Charles the Bald (location unknown). Photo: courtesy of Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München. 26.4 Imperial insignia, including, at left, the Bügelkrone (second half of the tenth century with cross from the early eleventh and arch from the reign of Konrad II [1024-39]): at right, the imperial orb (c. 1200). and diagonally across the front, the imperial sword in its scabbard (middle third of the eleventh

century). Vienna. Imperial Treasury. Photo courtesy of KHMMuseumsverband. 26.5 Tomb of Philip III, king of France (r. 1271-85). at Saint-Denis. 1297-1307, Paris. Photo courtesy of Bildarchiv Foto Marburg. 27.1 Francesco di Giorgio. Ground plan of a church corresponding to the proportions of the human figure. MS. Ashb. 361, c. lOv. Image courtesy of Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence. 27.2 Anastasis Rotunda, Terusalem, interior. Image courtesy of C. and E. V. del Álamo. 27.3 Church of La Vera Cruz, Segovia, interior. Image courtesy of C. and E. V. del Álamo. 27.4 Castle and town of Frias (Burgos). Image courtesy of C. and E. V. del Álamo. 28.1 Teanne de Laval’s coat of arms showing a marshalling of arms. Represented are the six arms of her husband, René d’Anjou, as well as her own coat of arms, together with four different coats of arms. Next to the crowned shield - she is queen of Sicily her badge of two linked turtledoves is symbolic of eternal love and fidelity. Jeanne de Laval Psalter, Poitiers, Médiathèque Francois Mitterrand, Ms. 41, f. 22r. Image courtesy of the Médiathèque Francois Mitterand, Poitiers. 28.2 The testone of Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1466 d. 1476) shows his portrait (the name of this coin means portrait). His arms are surmounted by his crest showing the Biscia - a monstrous snake spitting at a man - as well as his monogram GZM and the tizzone badge, of a flaming stick from which two buckets hang, a possible symbol of temperance. Image courtesy of www.cgb.fr. 28.3 Donatello’s heraldic work on a gravestone in the church Santa Maria in Aracoeli at Roma. The artist used imagery from antiquity as well as the imago clipeata - a portrait of the deceased carried by two winged genii - here represented as two angels carrying the dead person’s coat of arms in an almond shield typical of the renaissance. Rome, Santa Maria in Aracoeli church. Image courtesy of Laurent Hablot.

28.4 Scene showing the dedication of a book, the Paradis de la Reine Sibylle. Here, the book is presented by the author. Antoine de La Sale, to his protector, the duchess Agnese de Bourbon. Both writer and princess are represented by their coats of arms, showing the ability of the signs to represent the figures in absentia. Chantilly. Bibliothèque des archives et du château de Chantilly, Ms. 653, f. lr. Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque des archives et du château de Chantilly. 29.1 The known world of Europe. Asia, and Africa and its islands. surrounded by ocean. Hereford mappa mundi. circa 1300. Photo courtesy of the Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust and the dean and chapter of Hereford Cathedral29.2 The Roman emperor Augustus orders the measurement of the world. He is placed next to Ireland at the northwestern ends of the earth. Hereford mappa mundi. circa 1300. Photo courtesy of the Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust and the dean and chapter of Hereford Cathedral. 29.3 The Last Tudgment. Hereford mappa mundi, circa 1300. Photo courtesy of the Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust and the dean and chapter of Hereford Cathedral. 30.1 Trial of Eugenia, c. 1120. North aisle of the nave. La Madeleine, Vezelay. Image courtesy of Nick Havholm. 30.2 Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, Vision I, c. 1175. Wiesbaden, Hessische Landesbibliothek, MS I, fol. 2r (original lost in 1945). Photo © Rheinisches Bildarchiv. 30.3 Herman, lean, and Paul de Limbourg, Flagellants, The Belles Heures of Tohn, Duke of Berry, 1405-1408/09. New York, The Cloisters Collection 1954, MS. 54.1.1, fol. 74v. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. http://www.metmuseum.org/collections. 30.4 Deaths of Dives and Lazarus, Compilation of Literary Texts, France, 1355-62. Dijon, Bibl. Mun. MS 525, fol. 131v. Image courtesy of IHRT. 30.5 Commendation of the Soul, “The Hours of the Earls of

Ormond,” London, before 1467. British Library, Harley MS 2887, fol. 97v. © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. 31.1 Mirror cover: Scenes of lovers. 1340-60, Ivory. 0.7 x diam. 9 cm (1/4 x 3 9/16 in.) Gift of Mrs. Albert E, McVittv. Princeton University Art Museum, (y1954-61). Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane. 31.2 Mirror cover: Chess Game, fourteenth century, Paris, France. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane. 31.3 Mirror cover: The God of Love and a Couple, 1300-1320, Paris, France. Victoria and Albert Museum. London.© Victoria and Albert Museum. London. 31.4 Mirror cover: Pairs of Lovers, fourteenth century, France. Photo © Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels. 31.5 Roundel with scenes of the attack on the Castle of Love, c. 1320-40, Paris. France, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection. 2003. 33.1 Leaf carvings in the Chapter House of Southwell Minster. England, c. 1300. Cinquefoil leaves and flowers, believed to have magical powers associated with the number five, hence the Latin name potentilla. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 33.2 The Hours of Engelbert of Nassau. Flemish, c. 1470, Oxford Bodleian Library, ms Douce 210-220, f. 133. The miniature showing the Nativity is attributed to the Master of Mary of Burgundy; the flower-strewn borders were added a little later, but their origins have been associated with his work. It was typical of the Ghent-Bruges Hours that the flowers were arranged in patterns; here red roses and red double daisies were interspersed with white daisies, stocks, and a pea flower, alternating with blue speedwell, borage, cornflower, columbine, and heartsease. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 34.1 View to apse with light penetrating nave at 10:00 a.m. in Tulv 2015, Katholikon. Monastery of Hosios Loukas. Greece, early eleventh century. Image courtesy of Sharon Gerstel. 34.2 Interior of the ambulatory of the choir. Abbey Church of Saint-Denis, France, 1140-1144. Image courtesy of Stephen

Gardner. 34.3 Apse with tetragram over central window. Church of the Virgin Peribleptos (St. Clement), Ohrid, Macedonia. 1295. Image courtesy of Sharon Gerstel. 34.4 Nicholas of Verdun, Annunciation to the Virgin, Klosterneuburg Altarpiece, 1181. Sammlungen des Stiftes. Losterneuberg, Austria. Photo courtesy of Art Resource. 35.1 Right leaf of a diptych with The Coronation of the Virgin and Angel Musicians. Venice (?). late fourteenth century. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 1971. www.metmuseum.org. 35.2 Angel Musicians. Beaupré Antiphonary (Volume I), fol. 2r. Walters Art Museum MS W.759. Gift of the William R. Hearst Foundation, 1957. 35.3 Ivory plaque with scenes from the life of Saint Emilianus, from the reliquary of San Millan de la Cogolla. Master Engelram and his son Redolfo, c. 1060-80. New York. Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection. 1987. www.metmuseum.org. 35.4 Three Singers at a Lectern, from the Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg, Duchess of Normandy (Paris, before 1349). folio 146v. Attributed to lean Le Noir (French, active 1331-75) and Workshop. New York, Metropolitan Museum. The Cloisters Collection, 1969. www.metmuseum.org. 36.1 Scribal doodle of Salarno Vidal on the cover of a liber iudeorum from 1334-1340 (Arxiu i Biblioteca Episcopal de Vic, Arxiu de la Cûria Fumada, nûm. 4603). Photo courtesy of Arxiu i Biblioteca Episcopal de Vic, reproduced by permission. 36.2 Matthew Paris Tartars eatin hgxman flesh from the Chronica Majora (Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 16), fol. 167r. Photo reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. 36.3 Story of the Muslim Converted by an Image of the Virgin (Cantiga 46), Cantigas de Santa Maria (Real Biblioteca de El

Escorial, MS T.I.1), fol. 68v. © Patrimonio Nacional, reproduced by permission. 36.4 A charivari in progress, Roman de Fauvel (Paris, Bibiliotheque Nationale de France, MS fr. 146), fol. 36v. Photo courtesy of BnF, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY, reproduced by permission. 37.1 Saint Luke and his ox, Praverbook of Michelino da Besozzo, Milan, c. 1420. New York. ML, MS M. 944, f. 75v, Photo courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum, New York. 37.2 Fox preaching poultry, misericord, oak, c. 1425, Ludlow, St. Lawrence parish church. Image courtesy of Shaun Ward. 37.3 Bat-woman, misericord, oak, c. 1425. Ludlow, St. Lawrence parish church. Image courtesy of Shaun Ward. 37.4 Schoolmaster, misericord, oak, c. 1450. Ludlow, St. Lawrence parish church. Image courtesy of Shaun Ward. 38.1 “Monster Average.” London, British Library, MS Royal 20 B.xx, Historia de proelis in a French translation (Le Livre et le vrave hvstoire du bon rov AlixandreL c. 1420. 38.2 Alexander Battles Blemmyes, London, British Library, MS Royal 20 B.xx, f. 80, Historia de proelis in a French translation (Le Livre et le vrave hvstoire du bon rov Alixandreh c. 1420, © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. 38.3 Alexander Battles Boars and Wild Men, London, British Library, MS Royal 20 B.xx, f. 51, Historia de proelis in a French translation (Le Livre et le vrave hvstoire du bon rov AlixandreL c. 1420, © The British Library Board, All Rights Reserved. 38.4 Cvnocephalus, London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv, f. 3, Wonders of the East, c. 1000, © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. 38.5 Cvnocephali, Tympanum of the Benedictine Abbey Church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, Vezelav. Image courtesy of Karl Steel. Pl. 1 Michael Camille. Image courtesy of Stuart Michaels. Pl. 2 Trinity of Saint Anne with donor. Atelier of the Master of Rabenden, polychrome wood, c. 1515, Unter den Linden Museum, Colmar (89.3.1). Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane.

Pl. 3 Mary Magdalene, German, c. 1520-1530, Liebieghaus, Frankfurt (Inv. Nr. 2). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Pl. 4 Image of Christ, S. Appollinare in Nuovo. Ravenna, early sixth century. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Pl. 5 Carrow Psalter (Ms.W.34, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, f.27 r), English, c. 1250. Note the green crosses in the Carrying of the Cross and the Crucifixion. Illustration courtesy of Walters Art Museum, created under Creative Commons License. Pl. 6 Master of the Paradise Garden (Upper Rhenish), The Paradise Garden, c. 1420, Stadelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, HM 54. In a typical enclosed garden the Virgin is seated among flowers and the Christ Child is learning music from St. Cecilia (who has a headdress of peapods), while St. Dorothea picks cherries. Along the wall (left to right) the flowers are red roses, speedwell, betonv, lychnis, stocks, iris, and hollyhock. In the grass the flowers include white lily, peony, strawberries, lilies of the valley, leucoium, cowslips, yellow wallflowers, periwinkles, daisies, and violets. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Pl. 7 Transfiguration. Church of Holy Apostles, Thessaloniki, Greece. Early fourteenth century. Image courtesy of Sharon Gerstel. Pl. 8 Horses, Rochester Bestiary, southeast England, second quarter, thirteenth century. London, BL, MS Royal 12 XIII, f. 42v (detail). © The British Library Board, All Rights Reserved.

Preface

Whether we like it or not, subject matter, iconography, iconology, or whatever term we want to call the visual content of works of art is a field that is destined to remain at the forefront of art historical studies. It is a field that has suffered since it was first developed in the late medieval-early Renaissance periods and no more so has that criticism been louder than in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It has been seen as one of the two pillars of art history, along with style, and has been criticized as an antiquated approach to understanding a work of art. Mercifully, style now seems to have usurped that of iconography in terms of criticism and iconography continues along its well-trodden and useful path. It is a complex field of study, as the many essays in this volume prove. Iconography does not stand on its own but lies at the core of a complex set of interrelationships going from form to period and function to intention. How do we try to understand the working and intentions of the maker or person who commissioned the work? How do we transpose ourselves to a mentality that is totally alien to our own, and attempt to understand exactly what the subject represented or meant? Representation may be easily accomplished, but intention is a different matter and therein lie the individual creative powers that are so difficult to understand. Subject matter can interact with other elements and change meaning entirely; meaning can change simply by moving context. Coloration can alter meaning as can countless other factors. Iconography is now usually understood, thanks to Panofsky’s seminal work, as the study of the broader meanings of works of art. It does not, or at least should not, stand

on its own as a means of studying a work but is closely integrated with all the other approaches. It is, unfortunately, a term that has now fallen into neglect, with the preferred term now being iconology. Iconology, as these essays show, has opened iconography out into a much richer field of study, encompassing disciplines other than art history. As complex a field as iconography or iconology is, it is also among the most exciting ways of understanding what a work means. The study of iconography has changed drastically since it was first viewed as a field of study. What we now consider as iconography has been broadened considerably, as a quick perusal of the themes or subjects in this work attests. We can now talk of the iconography of architecture or light or sound - concepts that go beyond the tangible and attempt to incorporate aspects of a work other than the immediately visual. It is now a far more inclusive term while, at the same time, less definite than its original meaning. The highpoint of iconographical studies for the medieval period was in the middle of the twentieth century when efforts were made to understand the methodologies of the field as well as their application to a wide range of subjects. Theory and application became firmly entwined in the studies of scholars such as Warburg, Panofsky, Morey, Van der Waal, and so forth - for them, understanding the approaches of those who created the works was as important as understanding what the work meant. Nowadays, understanding iconographical methodologies is a field that has been relegated to scholars other than art historians, but we are fortunate in this volume in having scholars whose interests span both aspects of the subject. This publication is designed so that both aspects of the subject are covered; we hope to look at the approaches used to describe subject matter as well as to selectively look at some of the main themes in medieval art. In much the same way as Panofsky formulated his tripartite system of subject classification, it is important for us to understand how modern cataloguing proceeds and how methodologies impact on this. We are now living in the age of the image, and it is important for us to

impose some level of order and access on the huge number of images that are available in the archive or on the web. It is also important for us to get to this material using sensible approaches, the most important of which are detailed in this publication. These approaches continue the pioneering work undertaken by scholars such as Warburg, Morey, and Panofsky and bring us into the age of the computer and iconography. Even though there are many scholars working in the field of medieval iconography who could have been included in this publication, the cutoff point for inclusion was the fact that they were deceased. Scholars are rarely only iconographers and most of those who are studied here were all-round medievalists whose foundations were fundamentally iconographical. For example, it would have been possible to include Perio Valeriano Bolzni, Vincenzo Cartri, Karl Kunstle, Arthur Kingsley Porter, Gertrud Schiller, or Kirchbaum’s Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, but limits had to be imposed. For those who have been included, the most pertinent of their works have been studied to detail their contribution to the field. It would also have been possible to cover all of medieval Europe and not to look only at the Western world, but that is the situation that pertains and Byzantinists, such as Kurt Weitzmann, who employed iconography throughout his many studies, are not dealt with here - that is the subject of another publication! The second section of this first volume looks at some of the ways we catalogue medieval iconography. It is important not only to describe accurately but also to be able to retrieve what we are looking for, and that situation becomes even more pressing with the rise of many personal databases of medieval images on the Internet. It is fine to put such images on the web but they remain undervalued unless we can find them, and the way to do that is to employ relevant standards and approaches. It is these that are outlined here. The third section of the publication consists of a series of essays on high-level generalized iconographical concepts. It would have been possible to adopt the usual encyclopedic approach, starting with a

figure such as Aaron and ending with somebody like Zwentibold of Lorraine, but that was never the aim of this publication. Similarly, it would not be possible to deal with every subject within the confines of one book and I apologize for the selective nature of what is included. Sports, games, and pastimes are one such subject that we omitted - simply because nobody was willing to deal with the scope of such a topic. It would also have been possible to include essays on the iconography of death or birth, the law or marriage, or any one of a thousand other subjects - the range you have here has had to be selective and my apologies if I have not included some theme you would have liked to have seen here. This collection has highlighted the lack of research of many pivotal subjects for the medieval period. It would have been possible to have significantly increased the number of topics dealt with in this volume had limitations of time and space not prevented it. The twenty-two individual themes discussed here represent some of the most significant in the field of medieval art. All of the authors here deserve to be congratulated and thanked for their heroic work. They all stuck to their topics and attempted to broaden the reading available for future research, highlighting the healthy state of iconography in the field of medieval art and showing how methodologies have changed over the last fifty or so years. The essays are a combination of case studies and generalized, high-level analysis. The writers were all asked to provide a short historiography of their subject, and it is clear that such evaluations of previous research highlight the new methodologies being used in the field. Topics are now rarely dealt with as isolated, stand-alone, self-contained subjects. We realize that iconography is just one part of a much broader picture that interacts significantly with what could be called cultural history, and to fully understand our subjects we also need to understand their place in this broader picture. Such topics are now allowed to talk for themselves, and our knowledge of them is significantly enriched. We do not simply describe but also attempt to listen and understand what these images are saying.

The essays in this volume do not restrict themselves to visual iconography but also cover text, idea, thought, and a myriad of other fields beyond what is represented. Iconography is no longer restricted to the visual, and even within that field it has been broadened considerably to include ideas outside the usual; it now forces us to look at the self in relation to the work and how it impinges on us. The topics themselves reflect some of the new subjects we are now seeing as influencing medieval art. Gone are the days when we dealt only with the physical and, instead, we can see how light and sound were or were not represented and not simply in physical terms. Even though the title of these volumes claims to deal with iconography, it is clear that we could easily have used the term iconology. All of these essays strive to understand the subjects in their broadest and deepest meanings. Some twenty-two themes, ranging from animals to royal and imperial iconography, are covered by some of the most eminent scholars in the field. Even though the aim of this volume was to study iconography in its broadest possible coverage, many authors are more comfortable dealing with the Western world, and as such, in many cases only reference is made to the Eastern world. This volume could not have reached its current state without the sage advice, help, and practical input of Erika Gaffney, former commissioning editor for literary studies at Ashgate. Before leaving the press she was an indispensable support for the entire history of this project and my sincere thanks go to her. Her advice and help were much appreciated. She was ably assisted by Michael Bourne, editorial administrator in the humanities in Ashgate. Some of the authors submitted their essays in languages other than English, and I wish to thank Jane Sykora, Elizabeth Weinrich, and Lorraine Knopek for their help in translating some of the extracts in this work. They were very patient with me! In the middle of this publication the project was taken over by the capable hands of Isabella Vitti, the editor for art history and visual studies at Routledge / Taylor & Francis who fully supported the project and has seen it through to publication. It is difficult taking over such a

project but I was very fortunate to have been able to work with such an accomplished editor. I’m grateful to her and her colleagues for their care, help and guidance. Isabella was ably assisted by a number of colleagues including Lucy Loveluck, Julia Michaelis and Marie Louise Roberts. Lucy, as Production Editor, monitored the transformation from manuscript to book with great ease and charm. Julia oversaw the publication at an early stage and was extremely diligent in her work but also particularly helpful, kind and efficient. Marie-Louise Roberts, Project Manager from Apex CoVantage, was the final set of hands and eyes to work with the manuscript and it was she who is responsible for delivering the book to the printer. It was a pleasure to work with her. I wish to unreservedly thank Isabella, Lucy, Julia and Marie-Louise for all their help. There was considerable excitement when I first approached authors to contribute to this volume, which rapidly turned into a lot of work. I have no hesitation in saying that most of the authors found the writing of these essays extremely difficult. It was not an easy task compiling somebody’s life’s work in six thousand words, or trying to distil their contributions to iconography from the rest of their career. Similarly, trying to cover the iconography of largescale topics is not an easy task but it is one which the authors here have attempted. They all achieved what they set out to do and my sincere thanks go to them. These are the scholars whose writings I wanted to read, and we are extremely lucky that they all agreed to contribute. Colum Hourihane, PhD, HDE, FSA, MRIA

Biographical Notes on the Contributors

Kirk Ambrose is professor and chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado Boulder. In addition to many articles, book chapters, and reviews, he is author of The Nave Sculpture ofVezelay: The Art of Monastic Viewing (2006) and The Marvellous and the Monstrous in the Sculpture of TwelfthCentury Europe (2013). Along with Robert A. Maxwell, he edited and translated Current Directions of Romanesque Sculpture Studies (2010). His current projects include a study of blindness in medieval art and an exhibition catalogue on women artists in Colorado, 1898-1950. He further serves as editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin. Dieter Blume studied history of art, history, and anthropology at the University of Heidelberg. He received his PhD in 1981 for a dissertation titled “Wandmalerei als Ordenspropaganda: Bildprogramme im Chorbereich Franziskanicher Konvente Italiens bis zur Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts,” which was published in 1983. Between 1983 and 1985 much of his time was devoted to preparing the exhibition “Natur und Antike in der Renaissance” in the Liebieghaus Museum of Sculpture in Frankfurt. He undertook his habilitation in 1991 at the University of Munich. Throughout his career he has taught at the universities of Munich, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Zurich, and Baltimore (Johns Hopkins University). Since 1994 he has been a professor at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. Between 1996 and 2013 he worked on a research project on

the iconography of the constellations in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Since 2013 he has been involved with Christel MeierStaubach on the research project “Ovidius moralizatus” by Petrus Berchorius and the illustration of Ovid in fourteenth-century Italy. Susan Boynton is chair of the Department of Music and professor of historical musicology at Columbia University. She is the author of Silent Music: Medieval Song and the Construction of History in Eighteenth-Century Spain (2011) and Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000-1125 (2006). In addition to publishing more than thirty articles on subjects including liturgy and music in medieval Western monasticism, vernacular song, and music and childhood, she has coedited five volumes: From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Customs of Cluny, with Isabelle Cochelin (2005); Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth, with Roe-Min Kok (2006); Young Choristers, 650-1700, with Eric Rice (2008); The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages: Production, Reception, and Performance in Western Christianity, with Diane Reilly (2011), and Resounding Images: Medieval Intersections of Art, Music, and Sound, also with Diane Reilly (2015). Hans Brandhorst was trained as an art historian at Leiden University and has been using Iconclass as an iconographer ever since the 1980s. He was part of the team at Utrecht University that created the computer version of the system in the 1990s, and he has been acting as editor of the online Iconclass system since 2000. His practical research often focuses on the simple question “What am I looking at?” in an iconographical sense. His theoretical work deals with the issues of how humanities scholars, in particular iconographers, can collaborate and enrich each other’s research results rather than repeat and duplicate their efforts. To accomplish this, the use of a shared vocabulary for the description of the content of cultural artifacts - Iconclass - is an important

condition. Together with Etienne Posthumus, he has created the online Iconclass browser and the Arkyves website. Madeline H. Caviness is the Mary Richardson Professor Emeritus of Art History at Tufts University and Professeur Associé at the Faculté des Lettres, Université Laval, Québec (honorary). She received her doctorate from Harvard University and is one of the foremost experts in the study of stained glass of the medieval period. She was president of the International Center of Medieval Art from 1984 to 1987 and president of the Medieval Academy of America from 1993 to 1994. She has published widely in the fields of stained glass, historiography, and sexuality. Among her many publications are Sumptuous Art at the Royal Abbey in Reims and Braine: Ornatus elegantiae, varietate stupendes (1990), Visualising Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle and Scopic Economy (2001), and “The Politics of Taste: An Historiography of ‘Romanesque’ Art in the 20th Century,” in Romanesque, Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn, ed. C. Hourihane (2008). She is currently working on a study entitled Limited Protection under the Law: Women and Jews in Sachsenspiegel Text and Image with Charles G. Nelson. Sherman Clarke is an art librarian specializing in cataloguing and authorities. He worked at the University of Pittsburgh, Cornell University, Rhode Island School of Design, Amon Carter Museum, and New York University, until retiring and doing freelance and itinerant work as a cataloguer and indexer. He studied art history and library science at Case Western Reserve University and appreciates that library work allows for a diverse and eclectic application of his art background and interest. He founded the Art NACO cooperative project, which builds name authority records in the international file maintained by the Library of Congress. He was awarded the 2005 Distinguished Service Award from the Art Libraries Society of North America.

Michael W. Cothren is Scheuer Family Professor of Humanities at Swarthmore College, where he has taught art history since 1978. He is also a consultative curator of medieval stained glass at the Glencairn Museum in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, and served for twelve years as president of the US Committee of the international Corpus Vitrearum. Until recently his research has focused primarily on Gothic stained glass, especially the windows at SaintDenis, Rouen, and Beauvais. He has published widely in scholarly collections and journals (e.g., Art Bulletin, Gesta, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Journal of Glass Studies, Speculum, and Revue de Part) and written a monograph, Picturing the Celestial City: The Medieval Stained Glass of Beauvais Cathedral (2006). He is currently coauthor with Marilyn Stokstad of a widely used series of textbooks for survey courses in art history. Recently his research has shifted from medieval stained glass to prehistoric Native American painting, as he seeks to discover and characterize the individual artists who painted the Mimbres bowls, produced in Southwest New Mexico c. 1000-1150 CE. Peter M. Daly is past president of the Society for Emblem Studies and professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of German Studies at McGill University, Montreal. He has numerous publications on German and English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on the European emblem tradition, and on contemporary advertising. He is coeditor with G. Richard Dimler, SJ, of the series of illustrated bibliographies The Jesuit Series (1997, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007) and a founding coeditor of Emblematica, “AMS Studies in the Emblem,” and the series “Imago Figurata.” He received a Festschrift in 2002. A Companion to Emblem Studies appeared in 2007. He published an edition of Held’s German translation of Alciato (2007) and a book on Alciato in England (2013). A volume of essays entitled Emblems of Death edited with Monica Calabritto came out in 2014, as did his most recent book,

The Emblem in Early Modern Europe. Having completed An Annotated Bibliography of Emblem Studies 1990-1999, he is currently working on bibliographies for the two following decades. Ralph Dekoninck is a professor in art history at the Université Catholique de Louvain, as well as codirector of the Centre for Early Modern Cultural Analysis (GEMCA). His research focuses on early modern image theories and practices, specifically in their relationship to spirituality, and on methodological issues related to the field of iconology. Among his publications is Ad Imaginera: Statuts, fonctions et usages de l’image dans la littérature spirituelle jésuite du XVIIe siècle (Geneva, 2005). He has also edited L’idole dans l’imaginaire occidental, with M. Watthee-Delmotte (Paris, 2005); Emblemata Sacra: The Rhetoric and Hermeneutics of Illustrated Sacred Discourse, with A. Guiderdoni-Bruslé (Brepols, 2007); Aux limites de l’imitation: L’ut pictura poesis à l’épreuve de la matière, with A. Guiderdoni and N. Kremer (Amsterdam, 2009); Ut pictura meditatio: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 15001700, with A. Guiderdoni-Bruslé and W. Melion (Turnhout, 2012); Relations artistiques entre l’Italie et les anciens Pays-Bas (16e-17e siècles) (Turnhout, 2012); Fictions sacrées: Esthétique et théologie durant le premier âge moderne, with A. Guiderdoni-Bruslé and E. Granjon (Leuven, 2012); Questions d’ornement (XVe-XVIIIe siècles), with M. Lefftz and C. Heering (Turnhout, 2014); and Machinae spirituales: Les retables baroques dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux et en Europe: Contributions à une histoire formelle du sentiment religieux au XVIIe siècle, with B. d’Hainaut-Zveny (Brussels, 2014). Denis L. Drysdall graduated from the Queen’s College, Oxford (BA 1958, Dip. Ed. 1960, MA 1964) and took a Doctorat de troisième cycle at the Sorbonne (1970) with a thesis in comparative literature (La Célestine en France). He was appointed to the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand, in August 1966

and retired as associate professor of romance languages in January 1996. He has published in the fields of Renaissance and seventeenth-century comedy, emblem literature, particularly early emblem theory, and some Erasmian texts, and has a special interest in the lawyer Andrea Alciato, with plans for a book on him as humanist and teacher. At present he is contributing to the translation of Erasmus, in the series Collected Works of Erasmus (University of Toronto Press), with one volume of the Adagia (CWE 35) and one of the religious controversies (CWE 73); he will edit one of the texts in this volume for the Royal Dutch Academy edition of the Opera omnia (ASD IX-12). He has been commissioned to collaborate with a colleague on the controversies with Noël Béda and the Sorbonne (CWE 80-81). Martha Easton is an assistant professor in the College of Communication and the Arts at Seton Hall University, where she teaches art history, and for the MA Program in Museum Professions. Before coming to Seton Hall, Martha Easton taught art history for many years at Cooper Union, New York University, and Bryn Mawr College, and she spent ten years lecturing at The Cloisters. While specializing in medieval art history, she also has extensive experience with Japanese art cultivated during the six years she spent living and working in Japan. Her particular research interests include illuminated manuscripts, gender and hagiography, feminist theory, the history of collecting medieval art, and medievalism. She is presently writing a book about medievalism and the patterns of collecting and displaying medieval art in the United States during the early twentieth century, focused on the scientist and art collector John Hays Hammond, Jr., and his spectacular medieval-style revivalist castle, built in the 1920s on the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Celia Fisher gained her BA in history at Kings College, London, and, after an initial career in teaching, her love of plants took over and she joined a department of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew,

which was evaluating the uses of plants. She returned to study history of art at the Courtauld Institute, London, where she specialized in the history of plants in art. She gained her PhD in 1996 with her thesis, “The Development of Flower Borders in Ghent-Bruges Manuscripts 1470-1490.” She has published articles in art and gardening journals and her books include Flowers and Fruit (National Gallery, 1998), Flowers in Medieval Manuscripts (The British Library, 2004), The Medieval Flower Book (The British Library, 2007), and Flowers of the Renaissance (Frances Lincoln, 2011). Gardening remains her main relaxation and her own garden in Kew has been opened under the National Gardens Scheme. Chiara Franceschini (PhD, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, 2008) specializes in Renaissance and the early modern art and history of southern Europe. She is currently a fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University (20152016) and a teaching fellow at University College London, having previously worked at the Warburg Institute as a Newton International Fellow of the British Academy and an academic assistant in the Photographic Collection. Her book, which is currently in press, looks at the concept of limbo (Storia del limbo) and explores relations between images of the afterlife, belief, and the social history of theology. Her publications in the fields of Renaissance art, visual culture, and European history, 1300-1650, include “The Nudes in Limbo: Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo Reconsidered,” which was awarded the I Tatti Prize for Best Essay in 2011. She coedited a special issue, “Classifying Content: Photographic Collections and Theories of Thematic Ordering,” of Visual Resources (2014). She is now working on the status and the normativity of Renaissance and early modern sacred images, with a focus on sculpted images of the crucifix. Sharon E. J. Gerstel is a professor of Byzantine art and archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the late Byzantine village and on the

intersections of art and ritual. She is author of Beholding the Sacred Mysteries: Programs of the Byzantine Sanctuary (1999) and Rural Lives and Landscapes in Late Byzantium: Art, Archaeology and Ethnography (2015) for which she won the 2016 Runciman Prize. She has edited A Lost Art Rediscovered: The Architectural Ceramics of Byzantium (with J. Lauffenburger, 2001), Thresholds of the Sacred: Architectural, Art Historical, Archaeological, Liturgical and Theological Views on Religious Screens, East and West (2007), Approaching the Holy Mountain: Art and Liturgy at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai (with Robert S. Nelson, 2010), and Viewing Greece: Cultural and Political Agency in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean (2016). Her current work on soundscapes in Byzantium addresses the intersection of chant and monumental painting in monasteries. Edward Grasman works at the Centre for the Arts in Society at Leiden University. He studied art history at Utrecht University and received a PhD from Leiden University. His studies are mostly concerned with historiographical problems from the sixteenth century onwards, in the field of Italian and Netherlandish art. His publications have dealt with various subjects, including Parmigianino, Paolo Veronese, the Lion of Mark, symbol of Venice, and Vitale Bloch, art historian, collector, and dealer. He is the author of several books, one of the more recent being Gerson in Groningen: Een portret van Horst Gerson, kunstkenner en hoogleraar kunstgeschiedenis (1907-1978) (2007). He also wrote All’ombra del Vasari: Cinque saggi sulla storiografia dell’arte nell’Italia del Settecento (2000). He coedited and contributed to a book on Saint Peter’s Church in Leiden and has several publications due to appear in 2016. Among these is the first volume of Italian letters on art collected by the Fondation Custodia in Paris, transcribed and annotated together with Hans Bloemsma, Henk van Veen, and Hans Buijs. An anthology of works by Julius Held is planned for the near future.

Laurent Hablot is Directeur d’études à l’Ecole pratique des hautes études. IVe section. Titulaire de la chaire d’emblématique occidentale. He works on emblematic systems and heraldry, especially in relation to forms and functionality of the heraldic sign in the Middle Ages. Sitting on the L’Académie Internationale d’Héraldique (International Academy of Heraldry), he is also involved in Société Française d’Héraldique et de Sigillographie (the French Heraldic Society). He received his PhD for a study on the badges in medieval Europe (La devise, mise en signe du prince, mise en scène du pouvoir) under Michel Pastoureau and Martin Aurell. He has published several articles on specific uses of heraldry and emblematic signs, such as the defamation of the traitor’s arms, the symbolism of the angel support, the sharing of the Visconti arms in late medieval Europe, and the blessing of the Joan of Arc standard. He is webmaster of the database DEVISE and is responsible for three research programs: SIGILLA (a national database collecting all medieval French seals), ARMMA (collecting heraldic medieval representations in Poitou), and the research team for Renaissance Emblematics. Anne F. Harris is vice president for academic affairs and Johnson Family University Professor of Art and Art History at DePauw University. She received her PhD in 1999 from the University of Chicago for her dissertation, “The Spectacle of Stained Glass in Modern France and Medieval Chartres: A History of Practices and Perceptions.” Since then she has continued to be fascinated by the narrativity, material production, and experiential reception of medieval art. Her earliest work with narrative intersected with that of liturgical drama, and the interaction between spoken word, narrative, and the architecturally situated image in the Saint Nicholas windows and plays at Chartres Cathedral. Her publications range from a consideration of the narratives of stained glass windows in the thirteenth-century spiritual and commercial economies of Chartres Cathedral to an eco-critical analysis of the late medieval wooden jubé and healing fountain of

St.-Fiacre, Le Faoiiet (Brittany), to a meditation on medieval art based on the word “Hewn.” She continues to work in multiple media within medieval art and has published on stained glass, ivory, wood, alabaster, and manuscripts. A persistent theme of her research is the effect of medieval art upon its audiences, both medieval and modern, reflected in essays on the teaching of medieval art to undergraduate students. Her research and publication interests have intersected with her seventeen years of teaching at DePauw University, a small liberal-arts college that prizes seminar-style teaching and discussion. Jack Hartnell is a lecturer and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University, New York, where his teaching and research focus on the visual culture of late medieval and early Renaissance medicine. He received his PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2014 for a study entitled “Towards an Anatomical Art History: Medieval Objects in the Shared Space between Art and Medicine.” He has held fellowships at the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Max-Planck-Institut fur Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin, and was visiting curator at Two Temple Place, London. He is currently completing a monograph on the image of the Wound Man, and an introduction to medieval medicine and art entitled Medieval Bodies, with the Wellcome Collection and Profile Books. Debra Higgs Strickland has taught medieval art history at the University of Oregon, University of Toronto, and the University of Edinburgh, and has served as director of the Glasgow Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow, where she currently teaches medieval and Renaissance art history in the School of Culture and Creative Arts. Her research interests revolve mainly around representations of animals, monsters, and non-Christians in medieval and early modern Christian visual and literary cultures, on which she has published numerous journal articles and book chapters. She is the author of Medieval Bestiaries:

Text, Image, Ideology (1995) and editor of The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature (1999, 2000). Her other major publications include Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (2003), and The Epiphany of Hieronymus Bosch: Imagining Antichrist and Others from the Middle Ages to the Reformation (2016). Joan A. Holladay has taught history of art at the University of Texas at Austin since 1985. In 2003-2004 she held the Dorothy K. Hohenberg Chair of Excellence at the University of Memphis, and in the spring of 2013 she was NEH Professor of the Humanities at Colgate University. She has also taught at the Universität Zürich and the Central European University in Budapest. Her publications on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts and sculpture in France and Germany have appeared in Gesta, Journal of Medieval History, Studies in Iconography, Art History, and other journals as well as in numerous essay volumes. She is the author of Illuminating the Epic: The Kassel “Willehalm” Codex and the Landgraves of Hesse in the Early Fourteenth Century (1997) and of a nearly completed book on imagery with genealogical content in the high and late Middle Ages. She was coeditor for Gothic Sculpture in America 3: The Museums of New York and Pennsylvania, which was published in 2016. Susan M. Kim is a professor in the Department of English at Illinois State University, specializing in Old English literature. She has published on the Old English Judith, the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, Beowulf, and the Wonders of the East, as well as on teaching the history of the English language. With longtime collaborator Asa Simon Mittman, she has coauthored a range of articles on the Wonders of the East and on Monster studies more generally; most recently, she and Dr. Mittman collaborated on an article on the image-text relationship and the representation of Satan in Junius 11. In addition, she and Dr. Mittman coauthored

Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript (Tempe, 2013), a sustained study of the images and texts of the Wonders of the East in BL Cotton Vitellius A.xv. Current projects include a textbook on the history of the English language (with K. Aaron Smith), a study of Alcuin’s mathematical word problems, and a continuing collaboration with Dr. Mittman on the texts, images, and material of the Franks Casket. She also teaches judo and plays traditional Irish fiddle. Sherry C. M. Lindquist is an associate professor of art history at Western Illinois University. She is author of Agency, Visuality and Society at the Chartreuse de Champmol (2008) and editor of Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art (2012). She has also published numerous articles on late medieval art addressing artistic identity, gender and sexuality, illuminated manuscripts, and late medieval Burgundy, as well as on medievalism and the history of museums. She has curated multiple exhibits on themes in medieval manuscripts, including “Media Revolutions in the Age before Print,” at Knox College, Galesburg, IL, and “Medieval Monsters,” at the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, LA. Her work has been supported by the British Academy, Fulbright, Getty, Kress, and Mellon foundations, among others. She is currently investigating the innovative and sophisticated ways in which often anonymous fourteenth- and fifteenth-century artists employed the human body to make meaning and guide viewer responses as part of a “rhetoric of the flesh” in late medieval art, an important, even defining aesthetic that needs to be better integrated into art history. This somatic aesthetic interrogates the difference between human and nonhuman, male and female, human and divine. To this end, her current work addresses posthuman themes in the Vienna Hours of Mary of Burgundy, masculinist devotion in the Belles Heures, and Nude Trinities in the Hours of the Earls of Ormond. Cornelia Logemann teaches art history in the Department of Arts

at the University of Munich. Her research focuses on medieval art history and the interaction between text and image as well as the role of allegory in the visual arts from the late Middle Ages to the sixteenth century. Loge-mann’s first book, Heilige Ordnungen: Die Vie de Saint Denis und die Bildräume in der französischen Buchmalerei des 14. Jahrhunderts, investigated the different notions of space in medieval painting and the entanglements of devotional literature with the perception of images. In 2011, she coedited a volume on Cesare Ripa, Cesare Ripa und die Begriffsbilder der Frühen Neuzeit, with M. Thimann (Zurich, 2011), and in 2012 she cocurated an exhibition on the transcultural relationship of art and religion at the University Library of Heidelberg (“Götterbilder und Götzendiener: Europas Blick auf fremde Religionen,” with M. Effinger, U. Pfisterer, Heidelberg). From 2008 to 2013, she was head of the junior research group The Principle of Personification - Visual Intelligence and Epistemic Tradition, 1300-1800. She is currently working on a book dealing with personifications in French art from the late Middle Ages to the sixteenth century. Emilie Maraszak received her PhD for a study entitled Figures et motifs des croisades: Étude des manuscrits de l’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, Saint-Jean-d’Acre, 1260-1291 under Daniel Russo at the Université de Bourgogne. Her main research focuses on the history and historiography of the Crusades and Crusader states. She is the author of Les manuscrits enluminés de l’Histoire Ancienne jusqu’à César (2015). Her current research projects include a study of crusader art (military and religious architecture, sculpture, mosaics, mural paintings, icons, illuminated manuscripts), syncretism and cultural exchange between the East and West during the twelfth and thirteen centuries in the Crusader states, and cultural and artistic patronage in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Queen Mélisende, Louis IX). She is also interested in medieval literature, especially medieval historical literature which

traveled to the Middle East during the Crusades (Histoire Ancienne jusqu’à César) or else was written by crusaders themselves (Histoire d’Outremer of Guillaume of Tyr). Katia Mazzucco is a researcher specializing in history of art and photographic history. She holds a PhD in art history and the classical tradition from the University of Siena (2006), and has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Université Iuav di Venezia (20082009). She has also held postdoctoral fellowships at the Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz and the Warburg Institute in London (2010). She has been a British Academy Visiting Scholar (2011-2012) at the School of Advanced Study of the University of London, and visiting scholar at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, thanks to support from the Istituto Veneto per i Beni Culturali di Venezia (2014). Among her recent publications are “Sequence 1,” “Sequence 4,” J. M. Gusmâo, P. Paiva, Teoría Extraterrestre (Milan, 2015); Classifying Content: Photographic Collections and Theories of Thematic Ordering (2014), which she also coedited with C. Franceschini in Visual Resources 30/3 (September 2014); “Images on the Move: Some Notes on the Bibliothek Warburg Bildersammlung (Hamburg) and the Warburg Institute Photographic Collection (London),” Art Libraries Journal 38/4 (2013), 16-24. Asa Simon Mittman is a professor of art history at California State University, Chico, where he teaches ancient and medieval art. He is author of Maps and Monsters in Medieval England (2006), coauthor with Susan Kim of Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript (2013, awarded a Millard Meiss Publication Grant from the College Art Association and an ISAS Best Book Prize), and author and coauthor of a number of articles on monstrosity and marginality in the Middle Ages, including pieces on Satan in the Junius 11 manuscript (Gesta, with Kim) and “race” in the Middle Ages (postmedieval).

He coedited with Peter Dendle the Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (2012), and is the founding president of MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory And Practical Application). Mittman is codirector of Virtual Mappa, with Martin Foys, an interface to allow searching and linking among medieval maps and geographical texts. His research has been supported by CAA, ICMA, Kress, Mellon, American Philosophical Society, and NEH grants. He edits book series with Boydell and Brill. Current research interests include the Franks Casket and images of Jews on medieval maps. Mittman is an active (and founding) member of the Material Collective, and a regular contributor to the MC group blog. Karl F. Morrison is the Lessing Professor Emeritus of History and Poetics at Rutgers University, where he was based until 2013. He undertook his undergraduate studies at the University of Mississippi in 1956 and went on to receive his doctorate from Cornell University in 1961. His research has always centered on the history of ideas and he has worked extensively on the history of political thought, historiography (especially Church history), and the mechanics of tradition. Among his many publications are “I Am You”: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology and Art (1988), History as a Visual Art in the TwelfthCentury Renaissance (1990), Understanding Conversion (1992), and Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Papers from “Verbal and Pictorial Imaging: Representing and Accessing Experience of the Invisible, 400-1000,” coedited with Giselle de Nie and Marco Mostert (2005). Elizabeth Carson Pastan is a professor of art history at Emory University and president of the American Corpus Vitrearum, the body of scholars devoted to the study of medieval stained glass. Her books include Les vitraux du choeur de la cathédrale de Troyes

(2006) and The Bayeux Tapestry and Its Contexts: A Reassessment (2014), co-authored with Stephen D. White and Kate Gilbert. She also served as a coeditor of The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Art in Honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness (2009) and as a guest editor of the Journal of Glass Studies 56 (2014). Most relevant to this publication is the fact that she co-organized the Princeton conference Patronage: Power & Agency in Medieval Art (2013) with Colum Hourihane. Pastan has also contributed to numerous anthologies, including “Problematizing Patronage: Odo of Bayeux and the Bayeux Tapestry,” with Stephen D. White, in New Approaches to the Bayeux Tapestry, ed. Martin K. Foys et al. (2009); “Charlemagne as Saint: Relics and the Choice of Window Subjects at Chartres Cathedral,” in The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages: Power, Faith, and Crusade, ed. Matthew Gabriele and Jace Stuckey (2008); and “Glazing Romanesque and Gothic Buildings,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (2006). She takes pride in receiving both the Emory Williams Award for excellence in teaching in the humanities (elected by the faculty) and a Crystal Apple Award for teaching (elected by the students) at Emory University. Pamela A. Patton is the director of the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University. A specialist in medieval Iberian art, she has published two single-authored books, Pictorial Narrative in the Romanesque Cloister: Cloister Imagery and Religious Life in Medieval Spain (2004) and Art of Estrangement: Redefining Jews in Reconquest Spain (2012), the latter the winner of the 2014 Eleanor Tufts Book Award. Her edited volume, Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America, was published in 2015. She has written numerous articles and book chapters on such topics as monastic architectural sculpture, the image-text relationship, and the role of visual culture within the dynamic multiethnic communities of high and late medieval Iberia. Her

current research project concerns the semiotics of skin color in Spain and the western Mediterranean. Andreas Petzold was educated at Manchester University and the Courtauld Institute of Art, where he received a PhD on the use of color in English Romanesque manuscripts. He was a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1987 to 1999, specializing in medieval and Renaissance art. He currently teaches history of art at Mander Portman Woodman in London, and is an associate lecturer at the Open University. He is the author of Romanesque Art (1995) in the Everyman Art Series. He has published several articles and papers on the subject of color, among which are “His Face Like Lightning: Colour as Signifier in Representations of the Holy Women at the Tomb,” Arte Medievale (1992), and “De Coloribus et Mixtionibus: The Earliest Manuscripts of a Romanesque Illuminator’s Handbook,” in Making the Medieval Book: Techniques of Production, ed. L. Brownrigg (1995). Etienne Posthumus studied computer science in Johannesburg and first encountered Iconclass in 1999 while working at the University of Utrecht. He created the various online versions of the Iconclass service. His passion is making simple software solutions to complex problems and he specializes in cultural heritage computing and data manipulation. In 2015 he completed a master’s degree at the University of Amsterdam in book and manuscript studies. Matthew M. Reeve is an associate professor of art history and Queen’s National Scholar at Queen’s University. He has published extensively on later medieval art and architecture, including a monograph on the vault paintings of Salisbury Cathedral, edited volumes on Gothic architecture, and a volume on architecture in the classical tradition. He is currently completing a monograph on eighteenth-century medievalism in England, provisionally entitled Gothic Architecture, Sexuality and Aesthetics in the Circle of

Horace Walpole. Aspects of this project have recently appeared in The Art Bulletin, Architectural History, Studies in Iconography, and elsewhere. In 2015 he was mid-career fellow of British art at the Paul Mellon Centre, London. Daniel Russo is a French historian of medieval art who studied at the École normale supérieure (Ulm, Paris), the Sorbonne (Agrégation d’histoire), and later at the French School in Rome. He was a professor in Rennes and Paris before moving to Dijon, where is now based. He teaches medieval art history with a special focus on iconography (early Christian as well as late medieval), the historiography of art history, medieval Burgundy, and the art of Italian cities. He is currently working on the writing of medieval art history in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France. Among his publications are Saint Jérôme en Italie: Étude d’iconographie et de spiritualité (1987) and Marie: Le culte de la Vierge dans la société médiévale (with D. Iogna-Prat and É. Palazzo) (1996). He has also worked on medieval and Renaissance paintings in Burgundy, Peintures murales médiévales, Xlle-XVIe s: Regards comparés (2005), and has edited a volume in honor of André Vauchez, Expériences religieuses et chemins de perfection dans l’Occident médiéval (2012). His publications range from history to hagiography, iconography, iconology, and the history of theology and mural paintings. Diarmuid Scully lectures in medieval history at the School of History, in University College Cork, Ireland. His research and teaching explore classical, late antique, and early Insular and medieval representations of Britain and Ireland, and their impact on Bede, Gerald of Wales, and other key textual and visual sources, including the Hereford mappa mundi. These interests build on his doctoral thesis, supervised by Dr. Jennifer O’Reilly, on classical and late antique representations of Britain and Ireland, and their impact on Gildas and Bede. He is now writing a

monograph on Gerald of Wales’s late twelfth-century narratives about Ireland (the Topographia Hibernica and Expugnatio Hibernica) and their impact on English representations of the island and its inhabitants, marvels, and natural world; the maps and marginal illustrations in manuscripts of the Topographia and Expugnatio receive close attention. He has written articles on Bede as historian and exegete, Ocean and the British-Irish archipelago in the Greco-Roman, early Insular, and medieval imagination, Bernard of Clairvaux, Gerald of Wales, and the Hereford mappa mundi. He has coedited, with Elizabeth Mullins, Listen, O Isles, unto Me: Studies in Medieval Word and Image in Honour of Jennifer O’Reilly (2011). Patricia Stirnemann was a researcher in the Institut de recherché et d’histoire des texts in Paris until her retirement. She completed her doctorate at Columbia University under John Plummer for a thesis entitled “The Copenhagen Psalter.” She is well known for her manuscript studies, especially those from France, but she has also published and lectured widely on those outside the country, such as the Insular manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and on manuscripts from the Academy of Science in Saint Petersburg, which she coedited with Ludmil Kisselva in 2005. Among her recent publications are The Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry (2010) and Der Psalter Ludwigs des Heiligen: Ms. Lat. 10525 der Bibliothèque nationale de France, with a commentary by Patricia Stirnemann and Marcel Thomas (2011). A Feschrift in her honor, Le manuscrit enluminé: Etudes réunies en hommage à Patricia Stirnemann, was edited by Michel Pastoureau and published in 2014. Gyôrgy E. Szônyi is professor of English at the University of Szeged and of cultural/intellectual history at the Central European University, in Budapest. His interests include cultural theory, the Renaissance, Western esoteric traditions, and the conventions of

symbolization - early modern and (post)modern. He is on the editorial board of Aries and Aries Monograph Series and several other national and international journals. He is a board member of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE). He has held fellowships and scholarships from the Fulbright and Mellon Foundations. He has served as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the Department of English, Communication, Media and Film in Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. Among his recent publications are Pictura & Scriptura: 20th-Century Theories of Cultural Representations (2004), Gli angelí di John Dee (2004), and John Dee’s Occultism (2004). He has also edited European Iconography East & West (1996), The Iconography of Power (with Rowland Wymer, 2000), The Iconology of Gender (with Attila Kiss, 2008), and The Iconology of Law and Order (with Attila Kiss and Anna Kérchy, 2012). He is currently finishing The Enoch Readers: A Cultural History of Angels, Magic, and Ascension on High and The Mediality of Culture and the Emblematic Way of Seeing. Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo was a professor of art history at Montclair State University, New Jersey up to her retirement in 2016. Best known for her research on medieval Spain, monasticism, funerary arts, and audience response, her interpretation of the sarcophagus of Doña Blanca in Nájera (1996) brought together all these interests. She coedited Memory and the Medieval Tomb (2000), with Carol Pendergast, and Decorations for the Holy Dead (2002), with Stephen Lamia, collections of essays on tombs and shrines. Her interest in mourning and memory also resulted in an article about the fourteenth-century royal tombs at Alcoba?a, Portugal: “La rueda de la tumba de Pedro I como diagrama mnemotécnico” (2013). Her publications on Santo Domingo de Silos culminated in the book Palace of the Mind: The Cloister of Silos and Spanish Sculpture of the Twelfth Century (2012), in which the monastery’s medieval library and liturgy formed the

basis for analyzing the sculpture’s iconography. “Hearing the Image in the Cloister of Silos” extended her Silos studies to include the soundscape of the cloister (2015). Recently, she examined Bernard of Cluny’s customary for the use of Benedictine cloisters (2014). Earlier forays into architectural iconography include “Tarragona, lieu de mémoire” (2013) and “Portals and Figured Columns in Spanish Sculpture before Maestro Mateo” (2015). With Constancio del Álamo, she wrote entries on Spanish sculpture for Gothic Sculpture in America, Vol. 2, and the recently published Vol. 3. Upon studying the Epiphany reliefs from Cerezo de Riotirón, now at The Cloisters Museum, her interest in twelfthcentury Castilian royalty developed (1990, 2010). Her current research focuses on art in Castille during the reign of Alfonso VIII and Leonor Plantagenet (1158-1204), for which she received the Montclair State University Distinguished Professor award in 2015. Peter van Huisstede studied art history and history at Leiden University. In 1992 he received his PhD at that same university for a thesis on the Mnemosyne Atlas of Aby M. Warburg. He worked for nearly ten years at the Department of Computers and Humanities, in Utrecht University. While there he was part of the team that made the computer version of the Iconclass system. Together with Hans Brandhorst he compiled the three-volume catalogue Dutch Printer’s Devices 15th-17th Century: A Catalogue, with CD-ROM (Leiden, 1999). He is currently working at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he coordinates material relating to the EUR repository (http ://repub.eur.nl) of its Open Access academic publications. Future plans include a computer edition of the Mnemosyne Atlas. Marina Vicelja is a professor in the Department of Art History and director of the Center of Iconographie Studies at the University of Rijeka. She graduated in art history from Zagreb University, where she also completed her PhD with a dissertation entitled Byzantium and the Stone Sculpture in Istria - Origins and

Influences. Her main areas of research are late antique and early medieval art, Christian iconography, iconology, and medieval urbanism. She has a special interest in the early medieval sculpture of the North Adriatic region. She is the main editor of IKON - the Journal of Iconographie Studies and the principal researcher on a number of other research projects on the medieval art of Istria and Kvarner. She is a partner in the European project “Francia media Cradles of European Culture” and has collaborated on several international projects on iconography and iconology. She sits on the editorial boards of a number of publications and professional councils, and is the organizer of the annual international conference of iconographie studies in Rijeka. She is one of the founders of the Association of Art Historians of the region. From 2008 to 2011 she was a vice dean for research in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the humanities representative on the Research Board of the University of Rijeka. She has held fellowships from Erasmus, the University of Thessaloniki, Fulbright Fellowship, Princeton University, Saxl Fund Fellowship, The Warburg Institute and Oxford Colleges Hospitality Scheme. Harald Wolter-von dem Knesebeck has been a professor of art history at the Institute of Art History at the University of Bonn since 2008. He has a particular focus on the arts of the medieval and Byzantine worlds. He received his PhD in art history from the University of Göttingen in 1998 for a study entitled Der Elisabethpsalter in Cividale del Friuli: Buchmalerei für den Thüriunbger Landgrafenhof zu Beginn des 13. Jahrhunderts (The Psalter of Elizabeth: Book Illumination Made for the Court of the Thuringian Landgraves at the beginning of the Thirteenth century), which was later published in Denkmäler deutscher Kunst, hg. Vom Deutschen Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, in 2001. He subsequently received his habilitation in the history of art at the University of Kassel in 2006 for a study entitled Bilder für wirt, wirten und gast: Studien zur profanen Wandmalerei von 1200 bis

1500. Much of his research focuses on profane and Christian art and iconography, medieval manuscript illumination, and wall paintings, especially in Germany and Italy, as well as goldsmiths’ work and bronze casting. One of his most recent publications is his contribution to Die Wandmalereien im Braunschweiger Dom St. Blasii (ed. by Harald Wolter-von dem Knesebeck and Joachim Hempel) (2014). Dieter Wuttke, professor emeritus in Bamberg, is a German philologist and art and cultural historian. After finishing studying German, Latin philology, and history in Hamburg, Saarbrücken, and Tübingen, he became a teacher at the Altes Gymnasium in Bremen for five years. From 1962 through 1995 he taught German philology of the Middle Ages and early modern times at the universities of Bonn, Göttingen, and Bamberg. From the start of his career he included art and cultural history in his teaching and research. As early as 1953 he came into contact with and was under the guidance of Erwin Panofsky and of the legacy of Aby M. Warburg and the Warburg Institute in London. Officially named by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 1965, he was elected to the special commission created to promote and renew humanism research in postwar Germany. He was a visiting professor at the Universität Hamburg, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a fellow at a number of other institutions, including The Warburg Institute, Czech Academy in Prague, Westfield College (London), Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (Washington, DC), Stiftung Volkswagenwerk (Hannover), and Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities (Los Angeles, CA). He is a corresponding member of the Institute of Romance and German Studies of the University of London. In 1977 he started the series “Gratia” for Renaissance research (now edited by Joachim Knape) and in 1979 he began his series “SAECVLA SPIRITALIA” (still edited by himself) with his edited publication Aby M. Warburg: Ausgewählte

Schriften und Würdigungen (Baden-Baden). The most recent and most complete bibliography of his work is in Artium Conjunctio: Kulturwissenschaft und Frühneuzeitforschung: Aufsätze für Dieter Wuttke, ed. Petra Schöner and Gert Hübner (2013).

Medieval Iconography, an Introduction Colum Hourihane

Most definitions of the term iconography begin by expounding on the Greek origins of the word, and I too have been guilty of that!11 will not break away from such an established tradition here! It is derived from the Greek terms eikon, meaning an image or icon, and graphia, which has traditionally been understood as writing, describing, or sketching. Taken together, and in their most basic meanings, the term means the description of images. Description is just one aspect to the meaning of the term, however, and we also have to take factors such as the classification and interpretation into consideration. Since man first made images in the Paleolithic period he has sought to imbue them with meaning, and the situation is no different in the Middle Ages. Creation is a personal experience, but that does not mean to say that it does not relate beyond the self, and iconography is in many ways trying to understand what is conveyed in such messages. Seeing is an easy task compared to understanding and describing, and all are inextricably intertwined. The first serious attempt to look at subject matter is usually credited to Giorgio Vasari, who described the subject matter, its origins, and function of his works in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence in the Ragionamenti.- He outlined the entire iconography as if the audience would be unaware of its meaning, and this is the first document that describes the personal for the many. It really

was not until the very end of the Middle Ages and more significantly at the start of the Renaissance that systematic documentation of motifs and content started with scholars such as Cesare Ripa (c. 1560-c. 1622), Andrea Alciato (1492-1550), Perio Valeriano Bolzani (1477-1558), or Vincenzo Cartari (c. 1531-1569) - who worked on emblem books. These books, particularly popular in sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Europe, were illustrated catalogues of allegorical figures with accompanying texts and explanations, and have to be seen as part of the humanistic movement of the period. Iconography is not referenced in these works and, instead, it is iconologia, as in Ripa’s Iconología overo Descrittione Dell’imagini Universali cavate dall’Antichità et da altri luoghi. Largely classical in origin, these scholars included allegories from Greek and Roman sources, which of course were also known to artists of the Middle Ages. These were scholarly encyclopedias that attempted to analyze and understand the origins of motifs as well as providing a useful reference work for future generations. There is a considerable gap between these studies and the next generation of researchers, which happens primarily in France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scholars such as Adolphe Didron (1806-1867), Anton Heinrich Springer (1825-1891), Émile Mâle (1862-1954), and Louis Réau (1881-1961) were art historians/antiquarians in their own right, with a primary interest in Christian iconography and whose works were strongly influenced by their own beliefs. Their work was pioneering and, whereas they did not adopt an encyclopedic approach like Ripa or Alciato, they nevertheless attempted to be as inclusive and methodical as possible. Their efforts raised the discipline to a scientific level and provided a framework for future generations. It has to be remembered that images of medieval art and the works themselves were not as well known as they are today and what these scholars had to work with in terms of material and case studies was relatively limited. Their work was limited by what was known, and does not compare to

the current situation, where the image rules. They were also responsible for introducing the strong dependency for iconographer to seek out a textual relationship for whatever subject was being studied. This was also popularized by Panofsky, and it is only recently that this overdependency on text has been abandoned, having been a hallmark of iconographic research for many years. There is clearly a comfort for the cataloguer to work with a textual parallel that will confirm the visual, but not all images have such a support or parallel. We do not know if artists would have worked with such texts or how they were used when they existed, and it is always best for the cataloguer to approach the work of art from as impartial and objective a stance as is possible. As is constantly being demonstrated, the subject matter of medieval art can come from a variety of sources, including the imagination, and it is important that we remember that these works were made for different audiences - a fact we are inclined to forget. The general interest in iconography, which Charles Rufus Morey credits as being the impetus behind his own iconographical research and the foundation of the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University, happens in the early part of the twentieth century. That has to be seen as part of a larger and more generalized humanistic approach which was underway at that time. Were it not for his untimely death, Aby Warburg would clearly have expanded even further our knowledge of the way man approaches subject matter. As it was, World War II, and the dispersal of many of his students throughout the world led to the same expansion only a little later. Even though it is now fashionable to criticize Erwin Panofsky, our enormous debt to him in the field of iconography has to be acknowledged. It was he, as well as contemporaries such as Saxl, Morey, and Van der Waal, who put the discipline on a firm footing and paved the way for future generations. Interest in images has never waned, despite the unfashionable stance adopted toward iconography when the new art history developed in the 1970s. Some pivotal studies, such as

those by Baxendall, Bryson, Foucault, Freedberg, Ginzburg, Haskell, Vovelle, and Lancien, enabled us to understand images better than we had, but the desire was always there to extend the icono-graphical stance to its full potential.- It is clear that the age of the great iconographers has now largely gone, and the pivotal works so often referred to in this publication will not be repeated. Iconographical studies still continue, but not with the same force as in the past, and certainly not with the same pioneering efforts. Instead, this is now the age of the iconologist. Iconology bears little or no relationship to the term as defined by Panofsky, and was first developed as a new approach toward the end of the twentieth century. There can be no doubt about the significant role computers have played in reviving iconography. Medieval art is complex and its composite nature, such as a building façade or shrine with multiple faces or an altar piece with painting and sculpture, can cause cataloguing problems. Complex relationships have to be electronically preserved to fully understand these programs. The application of computers to art history in the mid-1970s was significant, and nowhere more so than in the field of iconography.Computer access to images has increased an awareness of the importance of iconography and made it one of the most widely used fields. Iconographie access has necessitated the cataloguing of minute detail. Whereas previously general subject terms sufficed, scholars are now looking for specific details. In the Index of Christian Art for example, a general subject term such as “Christ Crucifixion” no longer caters for user needs, and now scholars are looking for the Crucifixion with one cross and the Virgin only, or three crosses with Sol and Luna only. Existing terms need to be refined and extended to cater for such demands. Throughout history, iconographie cataloguing has used free text descriptions, controlled vocabulary terms or thesaurus like structures or combinations of all three forms.- Specific databases covering individual topics, such as music or medicine, have been created to enable in-depth cataloguing.- Databases are also now covering

more than Western art and resources covering Islamic, Jewish, Chinese, and Indian art forms have been created. These have necessitated the creation of suitable terminologies but the field is by no means exhausted. Similarly, the initial drive to develop iconographical standards and guidelines that took place in the 1970s and 1980s seems to have petered out.- This, despite the dominance of the image, is unusual. Archives and image collections continue to use their own in-house standards and still create new ones. A few large-scale cataloguing standards, such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings and Iconclass, dominate the field, and other initiatives, such as François Garnier’s standard, seem to have fallen by the wayside.- Similarly, the Art and Architectural Thesaurus developed by the Getty Art History Information Program does not seem to have been widely used for iconographie access and its strength is mainly for object terminology.2 The hoped-for single portal to allow iconographie access to disparate collections has not materialized and it may never, given the obstacles. Similarly, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Artstor database, developed independently of any specific collection but which was seen by many as the solution to image needs, has a long way to go. Despite heroic efforts, the data and coverage are inconsistent and iconographie access is not well represented. Of all institution types, museums seem to have been most successful in allowing iconographie access to their collections, and it is rewarding to see that a number of institutions, such as the Walters Art Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are now offering free images for academic use through their online sites. Even though their entire collections are not yet available online, these resources are making us aware of the potential of such sites. A similar, free image site developed by Wikipedia -Wikimedia Commons, where individuals and institutions can make their images available - offers limited but useful resources. Iconographie access is provided for the images and, even though they are catalogued at a basic and rudimentary level, it is a

valuable resource covering all periods and areas. Given the number of images taken from this resource to illustrate articles in these two volumes, it is clear that it has more than proved its value. Of course, the value of such a database lies in image owners making their resources available through such a site and it is hoped that this will happen. A similar but smaller database is also available on the website of the International Center of Medieval Art, which is once again dependent on its members making their images available free of charge for use in the scholarly community. Libraries and individuals continue to add their images to both of these resources, but it is a slow process. Many individual scholars have now put their own image resources online but with limited metadata, and iconography is very rarely included. Their initiatives are to be applauded, but the value of such resources is undermined by the lack of cataloguing and, in many cases, these databases are never consulted or used simply because the images are inaccessible. Even though the transfer from an analogue system to a digital one was rapidly undertaken in the field of library catalogues, it has not yet been accomplished in the field of image collections. This highlights the overall relatively neglected field of visual studies. Image archives such as those in the Warburg or Courtauld Institutes in the University of London are still not completely digitized, despite a need to have them online. Iconographical studies have come a long way since they first started in the sixteenth and seventeen centuries. The term itself has been broadened considerably and concepts are now included which have never entered scholarship before. In our quest to understand images we have gone beyond the level of simply recognizing and describing and have focused on understanding not only what is represented but also what they mean in the bigger picture and how they are mediated through the viewer. Traditional iconographical studies have focused on the chronological and developmental stages of a motif s history, but this has now largely been abandoned. It may still be there, but now it is incorporated into a deeper study. Our emphasis nowadays is on iconology as

much as iconography, but we seem to forget that to get to the iconological level we first need to progress through the iconographical. We can never understand the subject matter of any work by simply looking at one image. Value lies in relating the subject matter to other examples, seeing how individual works differ and why this is so. Even though iconographical research may have lessened, it is clear that much remains to be studied in the field. Some large-scale topics are still understudied while other topics have not even been approached. Celia Fisher, in her essay on plants and flowers in this volume, appeals to other scholars to undertake research on the subject. The many flowers and plants found in the borders of medieval manuscripts for example were used with purpose, and yet their meaning has largely evaded us. The iconography of what has been described as ornament, for example, has only recently received limited attention. Nonrepresentational motifs were used consciously, and certainly with meaning, but we are unaware of what these were. One such motif consisting of three dots arranged in a triangular arrangement and called the “cintamani” motif was recently studied with profit by Jaroslav Folda.— The spiral and interlace ornament on the Irish High Crosses was used with intent, and yet it has never been explained. Space was highly valued and limited on these monuments, and decorative iconography would simply not have been used. It is unfortunate that a vocabulary to describe these terms has never been devised, but it is just one of the many remaining challenges in the field of iconography.— It would also be a good investment if software design was able to link subject matter with period or style. It is one of the most frequently requested associations with subject matter and not all cataloguing systems cater for such refinements. As it presently stands, neither iconography nor iconology offers any associations beyond itself and, as these studies show, it is a quality which constantly changes. It is always interesting to plot such changes in relation to period or style and taste. Given its investigative powers, it is disappointing to find that

iconography is still relatively neglected in formal curricula. Iconography is still not formally taught in third-level education, and yet surveys have shown it to be one of the most used fields by the public as well as the specialist.— Most cataloguers learn just the skill of recognizing and describing subject matter through experience, and even then they are usually limited to a single period. The medievalist, for example, will not recognize subject matter in nineteenth-century works of art to the level required by the specialist researcher. Claims have been made for the last twenty or so years that object recognition software will replace such cataloguers, and that it is nearly ready to be fully implemented. The situation is unclear and even though enormous strides have been made, it still does not appear to be fit to launch. Neither has automatic image annotation proved to be the solution it was once hoped for and, until further enhancements are made, it is not practical.— As an approach, iconology has increased over the last twenty or thirty years, but not with the pace that the new exponents would have liked. Iconology does not solely deal with what images say to us, but what we can also say about them. It is a more complete and rounded picture than envisaged by Panofsky.— It has also changed since Warburg’s use of the term but does not appear to be fully understood as yet and is still developing as an approach; we are still, to use the title of a recent monograph, working “Towards a New Iconology.”— There seems to be a certain dissent as to whether iconology centers on the actual investigation of the work or the results of that research. This was first proposed by Creighton Gilbert in 1952 and subsequently extended by other scholars.— If iconographical studies continue, they are now largely focused on individual themes, as the essays in the last section of this book show. Iconology has taken the subject out of the hands of the art historian and made it the remit of the cultural historian. In doing so, it has opened up the field enormously and made us aware of connections and relationships that had not previously been

studied. It has validated the visual as a separate and worthy document which cannot be ignored. The anthropology and performativity of images are now looked at, and a far more holistic approach has been proposed - and all are examined throughout this publication.— It seems to be unfashionable nowadays to use the term iconography, and reference is usually made to iconology - a far trendier term. The field of iconological studies has been led by a few intrepid scholars, such as Hans Belting, Horst Bredekamp, Jean-Claude Schmitt, Barbara Baert, W.J.T. Mitchell, Keith Moxey, and Jean-Claude Schmitt, who have opened up the field of understanding images enormously. Projects have been developed around the concept and its future.— Numerous journals, monographs, conferences, and listservs attest to its popularity but iconography is still not dead! Iconology is heavily orientated toward anthropological studies.— It is claimed that there is now a greater awareness of the visual thanks to visual studies or the visual turn, terms which developed thanks to W.J.T. Mitchell’s 2004 study What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images.— This opened up the realm of the visual to other disciplines and media and elevated the image to its own rightful position in cultural studies. Even though it is claimed that the visual is no longer the sole remit of the art historian, it is still not being used by scholars outside of the field to the level that it should be. The hoped-for expansion has not yet happened. It is a movement which needs to take place and for whatever reason the holistic approach is more often than not lacking. Iconology is now used to explain a multiplicity of factors underlying the creation of the work of art. It is expected to provide the reasoning why the maker chose the subject in the first place, and this comes from studying the work and subject in relation to context, time, and form. The researcher needs to look beyond the immediate art historical context and instead to probe the socio-historical background of the work and world in which it was created and to explore the

conscious as well as the subconscious reasons why the work was made in the first place. Roelof van Straten believes that such explorations can then reveal the principles that characterize not only the individual but also the entire attitude of the period, area, group, or beliefs in which the work was made. It is believed that all can be determined through the individual who was responsible for the work.— Images are seen as living entities that can communicate directly with the viewer. The image now stands in for reality and is not a static, dead representation.— For Belting, the image is an object that works in social space and is animated by the gaze.— Our perceptions may change over time, but our senses remain the same and we develop an intimate relationship with the image. Ruben’s painting of the Crucifixion known as “Le Coup du Lance,” now in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp (oil on panel, 311 x 429 cm, inv. No 297) but originally made around 1620 for the high altar of the Franciscan Church of the Minor Friars in Antwerp, has an interesting iconological afterlife. The work shows one of the soldiers at the foot of the cross piercing Christ’s side. Its composition was imitated on several occasions, one of the most interesting from an iconological perspective is the painting on a porcelain plate from the Qing Dynasty and dating to c. 1720-1730.— Bolswert’s print after Rubens’s original traveled as far as China, probably with Catholic missionaries, where it was reproduced in color in this medium. It was made there in the reign of Kangxi, fourth emperor of the Qing Dynasty, by a local artist in Jingdezhen who had at least seen the print but may or may not have understood it.— Such a work shows the power of images to travel and to cut across the borders of understanding, also showing the difficulties in trying to unravel the place and meaning of such an image. Most theories try to evaluate the impact images have on us and how we analyze their content, but comparatively few make any effort to see what we do after seeing such work. One of the most significant is where we put our ideas into a physical form and that is usually done using the textual correlate. In the end we fall back on words. Studies

have shown how we mentally read an image usually from the lower left corner and proceed in an arch ending in the upper right.— Thorough identification, cataloguing, and description should proceed in a similar pattern. Whereas studies of the visual are especially welcome, it is also clear that greater collaboration is needed between art historians and scholars from other disciplines and that iconology in inexperienced hands is a dangerous tool. Iconology as used by scholars outside the field of art history frequently lacks the basic iconographical background and knowledge, and has meant that some scholars have a tendency to go into orbit regarding interpretation. Many non-art historians lack the basic iconographic steps necessary to understand images, and their iconological studies can frequently extend the interpretation into the unknown. Whereas interpretation is personal, it always needs to be based on the evidence. It was Panofsky who defined iconography as the “description and classification of images,” and iconology as “an iconography turned interpretive.”— Whatever we want to call it, our need to understand the subject matter and meaning of images still continues. Compared to subsequent periods, iconological research, as distinct from iconographical work, into the Middle Ages has been relatively limited and the focus instead seems to be on the later period and the Renaissance in particular. The chapters in this volume represent a balance between some of the better-known icono-graphical concepts and some of the most recent. They all highlight the contemporary role iconography plays in medieval studies and how its approaches and methodologies have adapted to changing needs. They highlight issues other than simple recognition, which was one of the guiding lights for such studies at the start of the century. They continue to show the lessening dependency on the text-image associations so beloved of past monographers.— Nowadays, iconography is seen in all its guises - from being an important key to understanding a work to the fact that it operates in different ways over time and space. It is no longer the static and focused element it was, and

instead is seen to operate on levels which were previously unknown. Iconography can change when, for example, the work is moved - it can alter its meaning under different lighting conditions, its role can change when it interacts with other elements such as sound, its meaning can change in front of different audiences - these are just some elements which are discussed in these essays. The chapters highlight the value of iconography not only for the art historian but also for a variety of other disciplines, such as music, literature, and history, and the value of all these fields working together. The chapters highlight the changes in approaches over the last few centuries, from the value of describing and cataloguing to looking beyond the work itself to the creator, viewer, and world. Apart from providing an iconographical history of man’s endeavors to unravel meaning, these essays also highlight some of the future avenues for research and methodologies which will pay dividends.

Notes 1 C. Hourihane, “Iconography,” in New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz (New York, 2005), 1069-78. See also M. Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism, trans. Philip Mairet (New York, 1961); J. Bialostocki, “Iconography,” in Dictionary of The History of Ideas, ed. P.P. Wiener (New York, 1973), 7: 524-41; J. Bialostocki, Stil und Ikonographie: Studien zur Kunstwissenschaft (Cologne, 1981); M. Dvorak, The History of Art as the History of Ideas, trans.

John

Hardy

(London/Boston,

1984);

S.

Sinding-Larsen,

Iconography and Ritual: A Study of Analytical Perspectives (Oslo, 1984); “Iconography,” in Automatic Processing of Art History Data and Documents. Pisa. Scuola Normale Superiore. September 24-27, 1984. Proceedings, ed. L. Corti and M. Schmitt (Florence, 1985), 321-31. One of the most recent and useful books on the subject is by R. van Straten, An

Introduction to Iconography, trans. Patricia de Man (Yverdon/Langhorne, 1994). See also F. Büttner and A. Gottdang, Einführung in die Ikonographie (Munich, 2006); P. Taylor, “Introduction,” in Iconography without Texts, ed. P. Taylor (London, 2008), 1-10. 2 Ragionamento di Giorgio Vasari Pittore Aretino fatto in Firenze sopra le invenzioni dette storie dipinte nette stanze nuove nel palazzo ducale Con lo Illustrissimo Don Francesco De’ Medici primo genito del Duca Cosimo duca di Fiorenza, Firenze, Biblioteca della Galleria degli Uffizi. See http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/artdok/894/1/Davis Fontes47.pdf. 3 See M. Vovelle and D. Lancien, Iconographie et Histoire des Mentalités (Paris, 1975); D. Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, 1989); F. Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, CT/London, 1993). 4 See M. Schmitt, Object, Image, Inquiry, the Art Historian at Work (Los Angeles, 1988). 5 C. Hourihane, Subject Classification for Visual Collections, Visual Resources Bulletin, No. 12 (Columbus, 1999). 6 Although now slightly out of date, a useful guide is that by J.B. Friedman and J.M. Wegmann, Medieval Iconography: A Research Guide (New York, 1998). 7 See C. Hourihane, “It Begins with the Cataloguer,” in Introduction to Art Image Access, Issues, Tools, Standards and Strategies, ed. M. Baca (Los Angeles, 2002), 40-58. 8 F. Gamier, Le langage de Timage au moyen âge, 2 vols. (Paris, 19821989). 9 See Guide to Indexing and Cataloging with the Art & Architectural Thesaurus, ed. T. Petersen and P.J. Barnett (New York/Oxford, 1994). 10 See J. Folda, “Crusader Artistic Interactions with the Mongols in the Thirteenth Century: Figurai Imagery, Weapons, and the Çintamani Design,” in Interactions: Artistic Interchange between the Eastern and

Western Worlds in the Medieval Period, ed. C. Hourihane (University Park, 2007), 147-66. 11 It is worth looking at L. Finance, Ornement: vocabulaire typologique et technique (Paris, 2014). 12 A.C. Foskett, The Subject Approach to Information (London, 1981); P.G.B. Enser, “Query Analysis in a Visual Information Retrieval Context,” Journal of Document and Text Management 1:1 (1993), 25-52; C. Gordon, “Patterns of User Queries in an ICONCLSS Database,” Visual Resources XII (1996), 177-86; L.H. Armitage and P.G.B. Enser, “Analysis of User Need in Image Archives,” Journal of Information Science 23(4) (1997), 287-99. 13 See P.G.B. Enser, C.J. Sandom, and P.H. Lewis, “Automatic Annotation of Images from the Practitioner Perspective,” in Image and Video Retrieval; Fourth International Conference, CIVR 2005, Singapore, July 20-22, 2005 Proceedings, ed. W.-K. Leow, M. S. Lew, T-S Chua, W.- Y. Ma, L. Chaisorn, and E. M. Bakker (Berlin, 2005), 497-506. 14 E. Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (New York, 1955), 26-54. See also E.H. Gombrich, “Aims and Limits of Iconology,” in Symbolic Images, Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London, 1972), 1-25, and W. Heckscher, “The Genesis of Iconology,” in Stil und Überlieferung in der Kunst des Abendlandes, 3 vols., Akten des 21. Internationalen Kongresses fulr Kunstgeschichte in Bonn 1964, (Berlin, 1967), 239-62. 15 Brendan Cassidy credits Warburg with being the first to use the term “iconology” in a lecture he delivered in Rome in 1912; see B. Cassidy (ed.), Introduction to Iconography at the Crossroads, Papers from the Colloquium sponsored by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 23-24 March 1990 (Princeton, 1993), 5. Warburg may have stopped using the word “iconography” in 1908 and replaced it with “iconology” - see M. Hatt and C. Klonk, “Iconography - Iconology: Erwin Panofsky,” in Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods, eds. M. Hatt and C. Klonk (Manchester, 2006), 98. See also History and

Images: Towards a New Iconology, ed. A. Bolvig and P. Lindley (Turnhout, 2003) and the essay on Warburg elsewhere in this volume and the work by Wuttke referenced there. 16 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconology. 17 The performative aspect of images for example is dealt with by Ralph Dedoninck in this volume. 18 One such project is Project Bilderfahrz, Aby Warburg’s Legacy and the Future of Iconology, See http://iconology.hypotheses.org/uber. 19 See B. Baert, S. Lehmnn, and J. Van den Akkerveken, “A Sign of Health: New Perspectives in Iconology,” in New Perspectives in Iconology, Visual Studies and Anthropology (Brussels, 2011), 7; see also M. Hatt and C. Klonk, “Iconography - Iconology: Erwin Panofsky,” in Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods (Manchester, 2006), 98. 20 W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, 2004). 21 R. van Straten, An Introduction to Iconography: Symbols, Allusions and Meaning in the Visual Arts (Abingdon/New York, 1994), 12. 22 P. Vandenbroeck, “Matrix Marmorea: The Sub-Symbolic Iconography of the Creative Energies in Europe and North Africa,” Baert, Lehmann, and Akkerveken, New Perspectives (as in note 19), 180. 23 H. Belting, Bild-Anthropologie: Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft (Munich, 2001), 158. 24 Among the copies recently shown in the exhibition “Rubens and His Legacy: Van Dyck to Cezanne,” held at the National Gallery, London, January 24 - April 10, 2015, were works by Edwin Landseer (1840, Her Majesty the Queen) and Delacroix (1850, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, inv. 2625) and a print by Boetius Adamsz Bolswert (c. 1580-1633, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Künsten Antwerp); see Rubens and His Legacy, exhibition curated by Nico Van Hout and Arturo Galansino with Katia Pisvin (London, 2014). 25 Now in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Künsten, Antwerp, inv. No.

5160. 26 M. Baffon, “Right and Left in Pictures,” The Art Quarterly 13 (1950), 31215. 27 See A. Tudor, Image and Influence: Studies in the Sociology of Film (New York, 1974), 115. 28 This aspect of iconography was also highlighted by Brendan Cassidy in the introduction to Iconography at the Crossroads, Papers from the Colloquium Sponsored by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, ed. B. Cassidy (Princeton, 1993), 10.

Part I

The great iconographers

1 Andrea Alciato Denis L. Drysdall and Peter M. Daly

Andrea Alciato’s name appears in early publications as Andrea Alzatus, after the village of Alzate near Como, where his family originated, but Giovanni Andrea Alciato, as he is known to the world, was born in Milan on May 8, 1492. He received his early education there under teachers who included Parrhasius, Lascaris, and Chalcondyla, from whom he acquired his exceptional mastery of Latin and Greek and his sophisticated philological technique. At the university of Pavia he studied law under Giasone del Maino and Filippo Decio, and then moved to Bologna in 1511 to continue under Carlo Ruini, eventually taking the doctoral degree in both civil and canon law at Ferrara in 1516. From as early as 1515 he was to publish a series of outstanding legal works that applied the philological lessons of Poliziano and Bude to the restoration of the texts of Roman law, not only of the Digest but also of the lawyers of the earlier empire whom Justinian had pillaged and fragmented, and even of the earliest Twelve Tables.- It was an undertaking that earned him the reputation, with Bude and Zasius, as one of the great “triumvirate” of humanist lawyers of his time.- As early as 1508 he had also essentially completed an historical and philological study of Roman inscriptions in the Milanese,- which, though it remained unpublished, formed an important element of the posthumously published Rerum patriae libri IV and was eventually recognized by Theodor Mommsen in the nineteenth

century as a significant contribution to the history of epigraphy.Other historical works included a letter to Galeazzo Visconti, originally published as a preface to his Annotationes in 1517, and later known as the Encomium historiae, which sought to restore the reputation of Tacitus alongside that of Livy. In the autumn of 1518, with the help of Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, his principal Franco-Milanese patron, Alciato took up a teaching post in the university of Avignon, where in 1520 one of his students was Boniface Amerbach. The latter was already in close touch with Erasmus and Zasius, and it was through Amerbach that Alciato’s letter to Bernard Mattius, later known as the Contra vitam monasticam, was passed on to Erasmus. Fear that the letter might become public caused Alciato much concern when, in the first years of the Lutheran dispute, he sought to conceal his early reformist leanings.- In 1521 he was made a count palatine by Leo X, giving him the right to award doctorates. It was during this Avignon period that he modified his early philological approach to include more attention to the medieval commentators, developing a broader conception of jurisprudential methods which characterized the teaching that earned him his European reputation. He left Avignon in the autumn of 1522 after a dispute with the authorities about his stipend. From 1522 to 1527 he taught in Milan, suffering considerable losses during those troubled years, especially as a result of the Battle of Pavia. In 1527 and 1528 he returned to Avignon, but was able to move, under much better conditions, to Bourges, where he was honored with the presence of François I in his inaugural lecture. His treatise on dueling, De singulari certamine, was written to support the king in his dispute with Charles V. In Bourges from 1529 to 1533 his fame as a teacher reached its peak and his presence there was largely responsible for the development in France of the historical school of law.- However, after negotiations with both Milan and Venice, Alciato was obliged by the Duke of Milan to return to Pavia, where he spent four rather difficult years. In 1537 he was

reluctantly allowed to take up a post in Bologna, where one of his students was the emblem writer Hadrianus Junius. It was at this time that he began to publish his Parergon inris, which were mostly philological notes from his wide reading in literature and history, accumulated during his work on legal texts, but reflecting also his particular interest in Plautus.In 1542 he was obliged by the imperial authorities to return to Milan. War again gave him the opportunity to move, this time to Ferrara at the invitation of Ercole II d’Este, but he was again obliged by the imperial authorities to move back to Pavia in 1546. Student indiscipline and the gout made his remaining years difficult, although his reputation remained undiminished. He died in Pavia in the night of January 11-12, 1550.

The emblems That Alciato was in fact the father and initiator of the illustrated poetic genre which is now called the emblem is not in doubt.- It was, in large part, the fruit of a hobby, translating Greek epigrams,- that he had cultivated, it seems, since his youth.— Some sixty of his translations appeared with others by well-known contemporaries, including Erasmus and Thomas More, in an anthology published by Bebelius in 1529. During the 1520s he seems to have developed the idea of the emblem; the Emblematum liber, printed - although without his authorization - by the Augsburg publisher Heynrich Steyner in 1531, was the first printed work to use the term in its title. It launched what was to become an immensely influential genre of illustrated books. This first edition contained 104 emblems; the second, authorized edition, by Christian Wechel of Paris, added another nine, and two more were added by the same publisher in 1542. A second collection of eighty-four new emblems appeared, after maneuvers which

remain something of a mystery, from the house of Aldus in Venice. The two collections were combined, though still as two separate parts of the work, by Jean de Tournes and Guillaume Gazeau of Lyon in 1547, and the total was brought to 212 by various additions made in the editions published by Guillaume Rouille and Macé Bonhomme in Lyon between 1548 and 1550. In these editions Barthélemy Aneau, who was primarily a teacher, rearranged the emblems, apparently with Alciato’s approval,— to form a sort of commonplace book. This became the more common form of the work, but the two formats existed side by side until early in the next century, suggesting that there were readers who not only used it as a commonplace book but also enjoyed it for the pleasure of the unexpected in reading, which Aneau obliterated when he reorganized the work. Autonomous editions of Alciato’s emblems presented from the start a three-part composition, consisting of a title or motto, an illustration, and an epigram, but editions contained within volumes of his Opera usually lack the illustrations. The format was not followed by all his imitators, some of whom omitted the title or motto, others the epigram. In the editions which do not have the format introduced by Aneau the emblems appear to follow no ordered sequence. Some, as we suggest ahead, are personal and occasional devices, some seem to have a topical political or satirical intention (the particular circumstances of some may now be unknown to us), and others propose moralizing interpretations of subjects drawn from mythology or natural history (Figs. 1.1 -1. 2). The epigrams vary considerably in length from one to sixteen distichs. What they do have in common is a description or at least an identification of the subject illustrated and an interpretation, though even here not always in that order, and occasionally emblems are found in which the name of the subject or the intended meaning is to be seen only in the title or motto. The symbolism, as explained ahead, seems to be consistently of a traditionally allegorical or metaphorical rather than a Neoplatonist nature.

How should one characterize Alciato’s emblems? Various approaches suggest themselves. One could ask about the provenance or source of the emblem. One might look at the application or interpretation of the emblem in the subscriptio. One could attempt to group emblems according to some larger topic, such as politics, religion, or ethics. One could consider the central motif, the object or event illustrated.

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comment. The scholars of the Renaissance wrongly believed that in the Hieroglypica Horapollinis they had discovered a key to the meaning of the ancient Egyptian signs inscribed on obelisks and other monuments, whereas the hieroglyphs were really a form of esoteric writing. These hieroglyphs flowed into the mainstream of the emblem both directly through the original Greek version of the Horapollo, first printed in 1505, and translated into Latin in 1517 (there were at least thirty subsequent editions—), and indirectly

through medieval Christian allegory, the most important work of this kind being Physiologus, and through the books of “imprese.” One of the first literary works to use the hieroglyphs fairly systematically was Francesco Colonna’s richly illustrated Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which probably dates back to the 1460s, although it was first published in 1499. Colonna’s hieroglyphs and their inscriptions were considered genuine, although in fact they were essentially recreations of his imagination, largely inspired by other imitations of hieroglyphs. Alciato certainly used some of the same hieroglyphs as this work, but it seems unlikely that he conceived of them as signs in the same way as Colonna. Assuming that one opted for the application or interpretation, the “meaning” of an emblem, then the first task would be to assign such meaning to each and every emblem. But it is not always possible to equate one emblem with one topic, let alone one meaning. Should the motto always be regarded as providing the meaning, or direction of meaning? For instance, Alciato uses the emblem “Imparilitas” (Inequality) to rate Pindar above Bacchylides. Is this emblem then a form of literary criticism? Or should the emblem be considered a comment on the inequality of Alciato’s colleagues? It features four birds: the high flying falcon, and the jackdaw, goose, and duck that remain close to the earth. Alciato usually, but not always, identified the general topic of his emblem in the motto, but some mottoes, such as those of the tree emblems, merely name the object. Then again, Alciato’s epigrams occasionally present more than one application. For instance, the emblem “In facile a virtute desciscentes” (On those who easily fall from virtue) shows a small remora impeding the progress of a great ship. The epigram suggests that the image conveys three things: a petty cause, a lawsuit, and “passion for a harlot, which draws youths from outstanding studies.” As first printed, Alciato’s emblem book was a more or less unorganized collection of self-contained statements on a variety of

topics. Some editions, such as the French translation by Barthélemy Aneau (Lyon, 1549), regrouped the emblems in loci communes. But the new orderly arrangement is far from satisfactory. Why should “In silentium” be grouped under “Fides,” or “Garrulitas” under “Superbia,” or “In colores” under “Amor,” to take but three examples? But some early and later editions continued the original unorganized arrangement, notably those of Jean de Tournes and those containing the French translation of Jean le Fèvre. Alciato’s emblems do, however, provide evidence of ethical, social, political, and religious principles, and occasionally of economic concerns. The emblems of the originator of the new genre cover a wide spectrum of characteristic humanistic concerns. Without prioritizing the themes, it seems clear that Alciato’s overriding concerns may be labeled moral, rather than moralistic, and ethical in the broadest sense. “Moral” here includes traditional notions of good and evil, with the virtues and vices taking an important place. Then there are professional concerns with justice and education, the former perhaps inevitable for a lawyer. Political topics are more widespread than a casual reading may suggest, and these range from the celebration of Milan’s rulers through the denunciation of greedy rulers and ungrateful sponsors, through questions of justice and power, statecraft and administration, to the rights of the people in near absolutist societies. But not everyone will agree on the definition of a topic or theme of a given emblem. Is the emblem “Nec quaestioni quidem cedendum,” for instance, a political emblem addressing tyranny and the rights of the people to rebel, or does it highlight bravery in the face of adversity (here torture)? Certain economic concerns also break the surface, although they never represent a dominant topic. Social issues are raised. They include the question of love, marriage, and of woman, and here Alciato seems very conservative, even unrelentingly misogynist. He never married, but whether such emblems on women bespeak personal experience or reflect a

dominant mood in a patriarchal society is another matter. It may appear odd to some readers that religious issues play a very minor role in these emblems. The friendship and mutual respect that bound Erasmus and Alciato— might lead one to expect that Alciato would have used more emblems for religious commentary. In fact, his religious emblems are few in number and they deal with very general questions. His experience with the letter to Bernard Mattius suggests he was concerned to protect himself. Perhaps the simplest and best approach to categorizing Alciato’s emblems would be to report on the central motifs that shape the emblems. Some later emblem writers would stress the role of natural history, human history, classical mythology, the Bible, and so on in the creation of their emblems. It is obvious that Alciato based many of his emblems on classical history and mythology. One has only to think of his use of figures such as Achilles, Actaeon, Aeneas, Anchises, Ajax, Arion, Aristomenes, Bellerophon, Brutus, Cadmus sowing the dragon’s teeth, Cecrops, Chimera, Cyclops, Democrates, Diomedes, Geryon, the three Graces, the Harpies, Hector, Heraclitus, Hercules performing many labors, Icarus, Janus, Leana, Marc Antony, Medea, the Minatour, Myrtillus, Ocnus, Odysseus, Phaeton, Phidias, Phrixus, the pigmies and Hercules, Polyphemus, Prometheus, the Sphinx, Tantalus, Thrasybulus, Triton, and Zetes. They tend to typify a human experience, which is used for didactic purposes: personifications such as Invidia, Nemesis, and Occasio; gods such as Bacchus, Mercury, and Pan; goddesses such as Athena, Minerva, and Venus; the figures of Cupid and Anteros. Then there are those many emblems that are based on nature, or natural history: animals, reptiles, fish, birds, plants, and trees. Alciato’s emblems are replete with apes, beavers, bees, beehives, beetles, crabs, chameleons, crickets, deer, dogs, dolphins, donkeys, eels, elephants, foxes, goats, hares, horses, lions, lizards, mice, oxen, oysters, pigs, rams, snakes, scorpions, tortoises, and wolf cubs; fish of various kinds, and many different birds. It is always a

traditional property of the creature that becomes the basis for interpretation and application. Praz was one of the first to draw attention to the “emblematic... mentality... of the Middle Ages with their bestiaries, lapidaries and allegories.”— However, it is to Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schone that we are indebted for a fuller account of the relationship of medieval nature allegory to emblematic art.— The typological exegesis of the Middle Ages presumed an ordered and meaningful universe, created by God to reveal Himself and His plan for salvation. Both the medieval allegorist and the Renaissance emblematist held that everything that exists points to meanings beyond the things themselves. The relationship of meaning to created thing is, therefore, not arbitrary or capricious in this world view, because meanings were derived from a quality of the object. A single creature like a lion could be seen from many different points of view, connoting many different meanings. These meanings could be good or bad, depending on the qualities involved. The lion could mean Christ, because it was believed to sleep with its eyes open; or the devil, because of its bloodlust; or the blasphemous heretic, because of its evil-smelling mouth; or the upright Christian, because of its courage. Everything could be interpreted in this way, for “good or ill” in recognition of inherent good or evil qualities.

Alciato’s use of the term “emblem” What is in doubt is how Alciato himself intended the word “emblem” to be understood when he first used it.— Nothing he says can be construed with assurance as a definition; he does not specify the number or the relationship of the parts of the composition in the way some modern theorists have tried to formulate definitions, nor does he explain how his compositions function as symbols. All the evidence available gives rise to

uncertainties and questions and Alciato’s contemporaries and imitators did not agree about how the term should be used. The first occasion on which Alciato used the word in writing is a letter to his friend and one-time publisher Francesco Calvo. This letter, dated January 9, 1523, contains the following statement: These past Saturnalia, in order to gratify the noble Ambrogio Visconti, I put together a little book of epigrams to which I gave the title Emblems, for in each epigram I describe something which is taken from history or from nature and can mean something unusual [elegans], and from which artists, goldsmiths, metal-workers, can fashion the kind of objects which we call badges and which we attach to our hats or use as trade­ marks, like Aldus’s anchor, Froben’s dove or Calvo’s elephant, which is in labour so long and gives birth to nothing.—

Calvo had been holding some of Alciato’s legal works without publishing them for some time; the Saturnalia were what the humanists called the end-of-year holidays; and the Visconti family was at the time Alciato’s patrons in Milan. It is now agreed by most scholars that Alciato used the word “emblems” here not to specify illustrated poems but as a title for the collection of verses he had composed. These epigrams were to have a symbolic meaning in that they attributed to the thing described (an object, animal, person, or event) an “unusual” meaning. Elegans means the opposite of banal; history or natural history in medieval and early modern culture suggests familiar, traditional allegory, but elegans suggests something more esoteric. Alciato seems to be saying that his epigrams, while retaining the basis of commonplace knowledge and assumed significances, are chosen to demonstrate his ability to make novel interpretations. We know from his correspondence that he had been translating Greek epigrams into Latin and composing epigrams himself since his youth. He was well acquainted with the fact that such epigrams were intended to accompany representations like statues and pictures, and that they usually made a moral or satirical “point.”— But to understand the choice of the word “emblem” we have to

see how it was likely to be understood by contemporaries. Of all the meanings which the humanists found in classical texts, and of which they had already made considerable use,— the common factor is the notion of an ornament which can be inserted in or attached to something else: a badge to a hat, a carved stone in a ring, embroideries to furniture, moldings to architecture, or, in a figurative sense, figures of speech and commonplaces inserted in literary discourse. What explains the choice of the word is not the symbolic use to which the epigrams are put but the notion that what the epigram describes, or the text of the epigram itself,— can be such a transposable ornament. Thus, although it seems clear that Alciato used the term here as a title for his epigrams, the idea of a representation of the subject is also implied. His successors, influenced by their knowledge of the classical meanings, were not slow to see the implication, and to shift the meaning of the new name in that direction. In the end the “emblem” came to be primarily the illustration, although modern scholars, looking back over the production of centuries, prefer to apply the term to the complete combination of text(s) and visual image. Perhaps the best evidence for what Alciato had in mind is found in his treatise on dueling, De singulari certamine liber, written for François I in 1528. Here Alciato uses the word three times in a way which can be understood only as intending a personal device.— The first equates “emblema” with items of apparel or ornaments, which were used to display the aspiration or the loyalty of the knight in the joust: It is accepted by a number of scholars that the practice of duelling was invented by the Mantineans, mainly on the argument that the military cloak and ancient armour are called “mantineae.” For this reason “mantineae” can be said in present terms [to be] the “ephestris”, which we commonly call the “surcoat”, the apex of helmets, pennons and emblems and combatants’ ornaments of that sort.

The second mentions an emblem called the image of Mars worn apparently as a talisman on helmets: “There are those who think

anyone who had on his helmet the emblem which is called the image of Mars would be invincible.” The third is the passage quoted by Alciato’s commentators to explain the emblem assigned to the duchy of Milan. In the Annals there is the well known encounter of Otho Visconti with a certain Saracen in Asia. Having defeated him and struck him down, he took the ornament from his helmet and added it to his own family insignia, that is, a viper vomiting out of its mouth a newly bom infant still covered in blood - in fact the emblem taken by Alexander the Great. Indeed, you can see the same image on ancient coins of his, to show how that ruler claimed enigmatically that he was born of Jupiter. For Jupiter was worshipped in many places in Greece in the form of a serpent, and there are in Asia types of serpents which men say give birth through the mouth.—

In the same period this usage is supported by an occurrence in a memorial publication for the chancellor of Charles V, Cardinal Mercurino Gattinara. Jan Dantyszek, Polish ambassador to the imperial court, describes an epigram he contributed to this publication, which appeared in 1530, as pertaining to the “emblem” of the chancellor, which was evidently the image of a phoenix symbolizing faith.— There is possibly further support, again in the circle of the imperial court, in the bookplate described as the “emblem” of Willibald Pirckheimer in his Opera of 1610. Pirckheimer also died in 1530, but it is yet to be established that the word actually occurs in a work of his published before that time.— An undated poem of Celio Calcagnini uses the term in this same way: “You will fashion on my ring these tokens and these emblems.”— Another occurrence of the term, though not quite so clear, is also suggestive. In a letter of April 22, 1490, to Geronimo Donato, Angelo Politian uses the word in a passage where he is speaking of mottoes (breve dictum) and devices (insigne). In this case the “emblem” is something inlaid in a ring, probably a stone, on which the words are to be engraved. It seems quite probable, and it is perfectly compatible with the

letter of 1523, that Alciato, in using the term “emblem” for his title, was thinking of his epigrams as verses designed to elucidate or accompany visual devices,— which in this case were created for Ambrogio Visconti and his circle in 1522. These devices would have been the original core of the later collection, which was expanded with other items that may not conform strictly to this definition. Whether Alciato himself originally conceived of a publication with illustrated poems remains uncertain, though the fourth line of the dedication to Peutinger, which appears in all editions, including the unauthorized first, may indicate that visual representations existed: While a walnut beguiles boys and dice beguile young men And old men waste their time with picture cards.... I forge these emblems in my leisure hours, And the tokens were made by the master-hand of craftsmen. Just as [we can] attach embroideries to clothing and badges to hats So each should be able to write with mute signs.... For my part I shall give, as one poet to another, paper gifts Which you should accept as a pledge of my friendship.—

It is also clear from his correspondence that the appearance of the illustrations in 1531 came as no great surprise, although he complained bitterly of their quality: That book was published, I assure you, without my knowledge, as I also wrote to our friend Palma. In truth, since it is so full of mistakes, whether we consider the absurdities of the pictures or the corrupt text of the poems, I am forced to put my hand to the work and to acknowledge this disowned and exposed off-spring, just when it was near the point of death, and to bring it forth again enlarged and better prepared... [Italics added]—

Although there may still be some uncertainty about whether Alciato originally intended his collection to be illustrated, he approved of the illustrations for the Wechel editions that followed from 1534, and those who purchased or read Alciato’s emblems

received illustrated emblems. In terms of reception the question of Alciato’s original intention is in fact irrelevant.

Alciato’s notion of symbolism Two sources allow us to gain some insight into Alciato’s notion of symbolism: the first is the contemporary history of the hieroglyphs, to which Alciato explicitly relates his emblems, and the second is his explanation of the nature of language. For both of these sources we need to refer to his treatise and commentary De verborum significatione, which was published in 1530, but which he had been working on since 1520.— In an aside at the beginning of the commentary Alciato mentions his emblems and compares them to the hieroglyphs— of Horapollo and Chaeremon; that is, he considers them at this stage not in the context of artistic production but as meaningful signs. He says, “Words signify, things are signified. However, sometimes things too can even signify, like the hieroglyphs in Horapollo and Chaeremon; I too have composed a book of epigrams in this genre; its title is Emblemata.”— The mention of “mute signs” in the dedication to Peutinger may also be an allusion to the hieroglyphs. The significance of these allusions lies in the question of how Alciato understood the functioning of such symbols, to which he compares his epigrams here as being of the same genre.— The collections of Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica published at this time— consisted of verbal descriptions of symbolic objects without illustrations. One may understand Alciato’s remark therefore as drawing a parallel with them: his Emblemata contain epigrammatic descriptions of “things which signify.” The question here is: how do these “things” signify? Students of the emblems have usually referred to Ficino and his commentary on some lines of Plotinus to deduce that the

hieroglyphs were thought of as “natural” signs. These do not represent, like verbal language, a discursive, linear account of the meaning, but provide a total, unmediated access to its reality, which is the platonic idea itself and is beyond words. But there was another possibility. In Bologna Giovanni Battista Pio and Filippo Beroaldo the Elder read the hieroglyphs with the help of Diodorus Siculus and Lucius Apuleius. For these writers, the starting point for the creation of the symbol is a natural property of the object. The hieroglyph in this case is seen as a representation of that property, a sign which is not the idea itself but an intermediary between the idea and the reader, with this difference from the arbitrary verbal sign that it is rooted in a natural quality of the object portrayed and functions like a simile or simple metaphor in the manner known to all from Aristotle.— As Alberti observed, such signs might be considered universal because to understand them, the reader needs no other knowledge than what natural history and technology teach him. The emblems can be understood as a form of hieroglyph, and both symbols can be thought of as conventional in the sense that they retain the basis of commonplace knowledge and assumed significances as, for example, in traditional allegories. Alciato, following Erasmus in his famous commentary on the adage “Festina lente,”— seems to have understood the hieroglyphs in this way, not as esoteric signs whose meaning was divinely ordained or fixed by a religious tradition but as humanly devised symbols to which he could attribute his own “unusual,” and surprising, interpretations.— In Book 2 of the treatise we find a clear statement about where Alciato stands in the debate about natural or conventional, fixed or changing meaning in language.— He refers to Cicero, Horace, Quintilian, and Aulus Gellius to show that words acquire their meaning from usage defined by the authority of the learned. In considering the nature of words and images as signs, the humanists had three basic possibilities from which to choose.— Firstly, Aristotle and Hermogenes in Plato’s Cratylus authorize the view that words are purely arbitrary and conventional, that

meaning is created by usage. Secondly, there is the view that words are endowed, in their original form, with a certain similarity to the thing that they named; they are “natural by their etymology.” Socrates speculates that this similarity is a matter of the phonetic representation of the qualities of flow or constraint inherent in all things according to the philosophy of Heraclitus. This seems to be Socrates’s own view, that names have an inherent correctness, though, when he turns to argue with Cratylus, he makes some concessions to the role of error and convention. Thirdly, there is the group of views, which go back to the idea of the “natural sign” espoused by Cratylus, represented by hermetic, cabalistic, or Neoplatonic theory, that some signs are magical or miraculous symbols, that they have the power of, or are, the thing itself. For Alciato, if there ever was a language, Hebrew for example, which was the origin of all others, and in which letters or words had a “natural” meaning, the languages which descended from it have not preserved this virtue, but have formed and reformed meaning through the mechanism of usage. It is usage, therefore, which will determine the meaning of words. The inclusion in the Commentary of the reference to the hieroglyphs and what was still a manuscript collection of emblems is fortunate because it is the only moment in the work when Alciato speaks of nonverbal signs - a subject which he admits is not really relevant to his treatise. The passage enables us to speculate with some probability about how their author was now thinking of the emblems. The point he makes is that things as well as words can sometimes be signs. As far as hieroglyphs and emblems are concerned, we may understand that they are not in essence words - ekphrases or epigrams - but “things,” or at least representations of things. His title, Emblemata, is not to be taken simply and literally as “Epigrams” would be, but as an image referring to forms of ornament which the dictionaries and usages of the time had already made familiar. They are, he says, giving a legal parallel, like certain forms of circumstantial evidence

(“praesumptiones”), that the law can accept as “signs,” and which are also “things which signify.” Alciato then gives a short account of words and meaning, in which the “res,” as meaning, is seen as being added directly to the “verbum,” the sound pronounced, to form the “dictio,” the meaningful word. The authority he names is Fortunatianus, but he is basing himself on an account of meaning which would be familiar to many contemporaries as that of St. Augustine.— This account in fact distinguished between the “res” as object, without reference to meaning, and the “dicibile” as the idea of the object (mental image, we might say) which could be added to the “verbum” to form the “dictio.” Alciato has simplified even this scheme, omitting the “dicibile,” to allow himself the notion of a thing which signifies. This is clearly unsatisfactory, even in the case of the emblem, in that it makes no allowance for a distinction between the “res” as the object pictured and the “aliquid elegans,” which Alciato himself had in his letter of 1523 distinguished as his intended meaning. It seems that his definition is somewhat hasty, at least as far as hieroglyphs and emblems are concerned. However, if this argument is pursued in the context of the ideas on meaning described earlier, it is possible to suppose that he thought the “meaningful thing” does not have to have a meaning added to it, as the word does; it has an inherent meaning. When he says in the letter, therefore, that in his emblems he describes an object or an event which may have an unusual meaning, he may be thinking of the object or event not so much as having a figurative meaning added arbitrarily to it but rather as having a figurative meaning already in it because of its natural properties. The idea of the purely conventional sign is not relevant to the hieroglyph and the emblem; only letters and words could be considered in this light. The indications are that Alciato’s emblems, being “things” or images of things, are signs of the second kind mentioned earlier - that is, they are analogous to words with an inherent likeness to the thing they represent, but are capable, as such words were capable, of change through usage,

of reinvention and redeployment. The evidence suggests that Alciato did not think out the semantics of his emblems very carefully, but we can say that his idea, as far as it appears, is consistent with the concept of the hieroglyph to be found in Diodorus Siculus and transmitted by the Bolognese and Erasmus, rather than with the essential, and therefore immutable, Neoplatonic sign described by Plotinus and Ficino.

Translations As we have noted, there were vernacular translations into French, German, Italian, and Spanish,— and many of Alciato’s emblems were also translated into English in Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems (1586). However, one should not suppose that sixteenthand seventeenth-century translators were necessarily guided by modern notions of the purposes of translation. We may today assume that translation seeks to reproduce the meaning and effect of the original in a different language. But, although most printed translations of Alciato’s emblems include Latin texts, that is not necessarily the purpose of the early modern translator. John Manning notes in his discussion of Thomas Palmer, “we do not know to what extent the original was regarded as authoritative, or merely as a stimulus to fresh composition.”— Even when translators make pronouncements about their translations in prefaces or introductions, these are usually so brief and general as to afford little insight. A full comparative account of Alciato’s translators and commentators would take too much space, and the various translations and commentaries have not all received adequate critical attention. The material bibliographical information is summarized here. Between 1534 and 1542 Wechel published three editions of a

French translation by Jean le Fèvre, secretary to Cardinal De Givry.— One other edition containing Latin and French texts but without illustrations, probably pirated, is now known to be by the Lyon printer Denis de Harsy. Le Fèvre’s text continued to be published occasionally until the beginning of the seventeenth century. Jean de Tournes printed the translation of the first book with the same plates as his Latin edition in 1548, 1555, and 1570. His French edition of 1615 contained Le Fèvre’s translation for the first book and new translations for the second.— In 1562 Jean Ruelle published a bilingual edition with Le Fèvre’s translation but with illustrations for only about a third of the emblems. The “lineby-line” translation of Barthélemy Aneau, which followed the new topical organization of the emblems he had introduced in the Latin of 1548, was certainly the closest but certainly also the least elegant of the French translations. It appeared five times between 1549 and 1574, published by Rouille or De Marnef and Cavellat. Claude Mignault’s translation, accurate but, as Alison Saunders shows,— mannered and overdecorated, appeared in a bilingual edition in 1584 and 1587. The first German translation was also published by Wechel, like the French of Le Fèvre, in a bilingual edition. Wolfgang Hunger, who claims to have made his translations between 1537 and 1539, is the first to suggest that the emblems had a potential use as an educational and especially linguistic instrument, seeing them as a valuable and easy way to enrich his own German for both literary and professional purposes. Like Le Fèvre, Hunger translated Alciato’s epigrams, regularly for the most part, into eight-line verses. He apparently hoped to produce a trilingual edition in order to include French. But Wechel could not accommodate all three texts on a page facing the illustration and preferred to publish separate French and German editions in 1542. This, however, was the only publication of Hunger’s work, which seems to have been overshadowed by the second German translation, that by Jeremias Held.— Jeremias Held produced the second German translation.— It, too,

is a bilingual edition with the Latin texts followed by Held’s German version. Held’s version was printed by Georg Raben in Frankfurt for Sigismund Feyerabend and Simon Hüter in 1566— and 1567 by two different printers, the second with “epimythia” different from those of Aneau. The first was reprinted in 1580 and the second in 1583, both by Nicolaus Basse. Held does not seem to have known the work of the first German translator, Hunger, or at least does not appear to have used his edition. Held’s version contains 132— woodcuts in text to Alciato’s 212 emblems, and they are numbered i-ccxvii. The numbering of the emblems has caused some confusion. Henry Green (190) called the number 217 a misprint, which it is not. The number 217 is correct and derives from the separate numbering of the alternative versions of the epigrams, which Alciato had labeled “aliud,” to four of the emblems.— As far as the Latin text is concerned, this is the first complete edition of Alciato’s emblems, although not all the emblems are illustrated. It does include the often omitted “offensive” emblem with the Latin motto “Adversus naturam peccantes,” though according to Tung’s concordance it is absent from this edition.— A ten-page preface in German [ Vorrede] by the translator is dedicated to Raymund Graff and dated September 9, 1566; a thirteen-page address to the reader also in German [Vorrede an den Leser] has the same date. Some of the illustrations bear the initials of the artist. The image for emblem no. 73 bears the initials of Jost Amman, while the picturae for nos. 113 and 135 have the initials of Virgil Solis. A second edition of this bilingual Latin-German volume appeared in 1580, also in Frankfurt. This time it was printed by Nicolaus Bassée. The contents, both text and pictures, are the same as in the 1566-67 issue, although some textual contractions are now printed in full. Pagination and fingerprint are identical. There was only one translation into Spanish in the early period. It was made by Bernardino Daza of Valladolid and published by Rouille and Bonhomme in 1549.— From the phrase “añadidos de

figuras y de nuevos Emblemas en la tercera parte” in the title, it would seem to have been based on the edition made by Gryphius in his Reliqua... opera of 1548, since this is the only edition of the Emblems which divides them into three parts. Daza’s edition is nevertheless in two books, like that of Jean de Tournes, preserving the order of the original editions of Wechel and Aldus. It is of interest primarily because it contains ten new emblems by Alciato, bringing the total to 210 (the “offensive” emblem “Adversus naturam peccantes” is omitted). Daza also adds two emblems of his own, dedicated to patrons. He uses a limited variety of verse forms, generally matching in length those of Alciato, and keeps fairly close to the latter’s expression and intention. At least two translations into Italian were published, one by Giovanni Marquale,— the other by Paolo Aemilio Cadamosto.— Guilo Cesare Capaccio,— author of a treatise on imprese, published in 1620 his II Principe, which contained unillustrated translations of Alciato’s emblems. Surprisingly little has been written about these translations beyond Henry Green’s brief comments. There is little to be learned about Marquale and his translation from the prefatory material. The privilege is dated August 9, 1548. The dedication, to Francesco Donato, Doge of Venice, states that the translation is made for the benefit of those who do not understand Latin, and the poem addressed to the reader emphasizes the moral profit to be derived from the emblems. Marquale uses Aneau’s arrangement, including some emblems from each of his categories and concluding with eleven of the fourteen trees, but translates only 136 emblems in the 1549 edition, and 180 in 1551. This remained the total in all the other editions (1564, 1576, 1579).

Commentaries

Both Bernardino Daza and Wolfgang Hunger— claim to have written full-length commentaries on Alciato’s emblems, but neither work has survived. The first commentaries to appear in print were the “briefues expositions Epimythiques” added by Barthélemy Aneau to his French edition of 1549. These are very brief, usually one-sentence summaries of the moral interpretation of the emblem. They were not translated and added to the Latin editions until 1564,— and subsequently continued to appear until the edition of 1616 by the heirs of Guillaume Rouille. The next commentaries to appear were the “Commentariola” of Sebastian Stockhamer, whose dedication to Juan de Sotomayor is dated 1 March 1552 from the University of Coimbra. He wrote commentaries for the emblems of the first book of Jean de Tournes edition in 1556, a most unusual edition since it does not have Alciato’s epigrams. A second edition of the same year contains the two books, both with Alciato’s text; the first book now has illustrations, but the second remains without either illustrations or commentaries. In later editions by De Tournes, including those of the French of Le Fèvre, commentaries for the second book are provided which are based on those of Mignault. The Latin commentaries of Sánchez de las Brozas, professor of Greek and rhetoric in the University of Salamanca, are relatively brief, but thorough as regards sources, and complete in that they gloss all the emblems.— They were published by Rouille in Lyon in 1573, but, as Luis Merino and Jesús Ureña have shown,— were probably begun before 1554. Despite the single publication, they were influential in that they were a source for Diego Lopez’s Spanish commentaries and were included with Mignault’s in the combined commentaries of the Tozzi editions. The only commentaries other than Aneau’s in a vernacular language were the Declaración magistral sobre las [sic] emblemas de Andres Alciato by Diego López (1615). He was at the time a teacher of grammar at Toro and Olmedo in the province of León, and dedicated the work to the governor of the province, Diego

Hurtado de Mendota.— He explains carefully the historical allusions and symbolism of each emblem and interprets their moral teaching. There were three subsequent editions in 1655, 1670, and 1684. At the beginning of his commentary of Emblem 4 (“In deo laetandum”) Claude Mignault seems to seek to distinguish himself from Las Brozas by saying that he will not always state the source of the emblem first, “as some others do,” but say whatever seems important about each emblem.— In fact he spends a great deal more space than Las Brozas on what he calls the “application” that is, on the moral of each emblem. His commentaries are by far the most extensive of the period. According to the dedicatory letter of 1571, they were already in a fairly finished state at that time, but he chose in that publication to excerpt only the parts relating to origin and meaning. In 1573 Plantin published what were then the full commentaries, with a “Letter to the Reader,” a preface entitled “Quid emblema sit, et quae eius ratio,” and a considerable number of “Notas posteriores.” The preface was entirely reworked and expanded in 1577 to become the “Syntagma de symbolis,” which now constituted a history of symbolism. The commentaries continued to receive minor additions in the editions of 1591 and 1602.— Considerably shortened for the “compendious” editions of 1584, 1591, and 1599, they were translated for Mignault’s bilingual, Latin and French, edition of 1584 and 1587. Finally Mignault’s commentaries formed the major part of the combined commentaries, with the notes of Sanchez de las Brozas, the corrections of Laurentius Pignorius,— and the “Corollaria” of Fredericus Morellus, in the great Paduan editions, edited by Joannes Thuilius and published by Peter Paul Tozzi in 1618, 1621, and 1661.

The reception of Alciato’s emblems in the

material culture The actual evidence of Alciato emblems in the material culture,— understood as cultural forms that are not products of the printing press, is slight. But one must always bear in mind that over the years fire and warfare have obliterated many of the products of the material culture. Much too, and probably most, of earlier emblematic decoration has disappeared, as tastes changed, and the need to modernize was obeyed. None the less, there is some evidence, but what we are left with must be a pale reflection of what once was. The emblem book is only one of the many media that disseminated the combination of symbolic picture and interpretative text. As we know, emblematic designs were incorporated into almost every artistic form. They are found in stained glass windows and carving, in jewelry and glass, needlework and tapestry, in painting and portraiture, wall and ceiling decoration, and architecture. Veritable emblem programs may be found adorning private residences, such as Bidding Hall and Llanhydroc House in Cornwall, and ecclesiastical buildings. Emblems were used as theatrical properties in dramas and street processions. Poets, preachers, writers, and dramatists frequently employed emblems and emblem-like structures in the spoken and the written word. In addition to the emblem book, we shall find perhaps even more evidence in the material culture of what is known as “imprese,” designed to accompany tournaments, or incorporated in tapestry and embroidery, in wood and stone carving, and on painted walls and ceilings. The earliest use of Alciato’s emblems in England is discovered in tournaments. It appears that the English employed imprese in tournaments as early as 1477,— and the practice continued intermittently throughout the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Alan Young’s edition of 521 English tournament imprese— shows that the English frequently used continental

models. It has long been known that the Elizabethan Accession Day tilts were important political and emblematic exercises, in which the imprese shields of English aristocrats played a prominent role. On occasion, Alciato’s emblems served as sources or models. For instance, in George Peele’s Polyhymnia (London: Richard Ihones, 1590) a tilt is described that was celebrated on November 17, the first day of the thirty-third year of Elizabeth’s reign. Sir Henry Lee, the queen’s champion, decorated his shield with the Alciatan motif of bees and helmet: “My helmet now shall make an hive for bees.”— Alan Young’s descriptions allow us to identify a number of possible sources, or parallels, in Alciato for English tournament imprese.— In 1602-1603 the Moravian nobleman Zdenek Brtnicky z Valdstejna, otherwise known as Baron Waldstein, visited London after studying in Strasburg. His diary— records Waldstein as seeing a picture in Whitehall Palace “of a cripple being carried on a blind man’s shoulders” (p. 43). Waldstein does not specify in which of the palace rooms he saw the picture. The Moravian traveler noted that the picture was accompanied by Latin verses, which we know correspond with the epigram to Alciato’s emblem of a lame man being carried on the shoulders of a blind man. Those Latin verses were followed on the Whitehall picture by the motto “Mutuum auxilium.” Although Waldstein does not attribute the picture or the texts to Alciato, the Italian was evidently the source.— This same motif of the mutual assistance provided by the lame man and the blind man is depicted on one of the carved wooden panels that were moved from a house built in 1572 to University College, Oxford. It also features on the Spring tapestry of Sheldon’s Four Seasons Tapestries, now hanging in Hatfield House (Fig, 1.3). The evidence of Waldstein’s diary account is one more small piece of evidence of the reception of Alciato’s emblems in Elizabethan England.— John Harvey, father of the poet Gabriel Harvey, was a successful yeoman farmer, rope-maker, and businessman in Saffron Walden, Essex. Sometime around 1570 he decorated the fireplace in the

parlor of his town house with a large mantelpiece of carved clunch (limestone).— The emblematic decoration is based on three of Alciato’s emblems that receive new mottoes. On Harvey’s mantelpiece the center panel shows Ocnus the rope-maker, and is flanked on one side by an ass eating thistles, and on the other by a beehive. The ass eating thistles has the motto “Aliis non nobis” [For others not for ourselves]; Ocnus is making rope that is destroyed by an ass and has the motto “Nec aliis nec nobis” [Neither for others nor for ourselves]; the bees leaving and returning to the hive are supplied with the motto “Aliis et nobis” [For others and ourselves]. The three panels make a statement about the value of labor and reward, moving from the negative to the positive. Alciato’s emblems have been re-encoded to make an economic and moral statement. This notion is then encapsulated in a motto that literally underlines the three panels - that is, is written beneath those three emblems. Emendated it reads “Nostrae placentae sunt labor” [Our cakes are our labor] - that is, our labor brings its own rewards. Alciato’s warning in the Ocnus emblem, about spendthrift wives or harlots, makes way for a celebration of mercantile entrepreneurialism on Harvey’s fireplace.

Figure 1.3 Detail of one of the figures in the border (upper left side) from Sheldon’s Spring tapestry, now in Hatfield House. The legend reads “In Consilio” (Deliberation). Late sixteenth-early seventeenth centuries. Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane.

The Summer Room at University College Oxford is decorated with English wood carvings dating from the late sixteenth century.— Twenty of the twenty-eight carvings depict in relief motifs taken from Alciato’s emblems. These include among others Prometheus and the eagle, the ass bearing the statue of Isis on its back, Ganymede on Jupiter’s eagle, Tantalus, three girls playing at dice, the lame man carrying the blind man, and the figure of constrained genius whose right hand is weighed down with a stone block.— Some warships were known to have been emblematically decorated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Elizabeth I’s warship the “White Bear”— and Charles I’s warship the “Sovereign of the Seas”— had extensive emblematic decorations, which included citation and modification of some of Alciato’s emblems, although the information is far from complete. Young notes that a German visitor to England in 1611 copied out twenty-seven mottoes and described twelve accompanying pictures in Elizabeth I’s “White Bear.” The sources were Paradin, the impresa shields on display at Whitehall, and Whitney, although two of Whitney’s emblems are identical with Alciato’s. These are “Festina lente” showing a dolphin and anchor, and “Maturandum” accompanied by a snake entwined about a dart or arrow.— The stem of Charles I’s “Sovereign of the Seas” was decorated with an equestrian statue of King Edgar and Cupid riding and bridling a lion, which appears to be a variation on Alciato’s emblem of Cupid holding the reins of two lions (no. 106). Perhaps the most impressive remaining example of the appropriation of Alciato’s emblems in the decorative arts in England is the Four Seasons tapestries, which hang in Hatfield House.— The tapestries, which probably date from the first decade

of the seventeenth century - the Winter tapestry is dated 1611 were originally made for Sir John Tracy of Toddington. Francis Hyckes is assumed to have been the designer of the Four Seasons tapestries. He had enjoyed an education in the classics at Oxford, and he retained a lifelong interest in Latin and especially in Greek. During what his son Thomas describes as a “countrie retirement,” Francis translated Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian Wars and selected dialogues of Lucian. It is thought that Francis designed the Four Seasons tapestries during his retirement when he was making these translations from the Greek. He based his designs on four engravings by Maarten de Vos.— He retained the central deity, the three zodiac figures at the top, and many of the rural activities depicted in his sources. However, the English designer enriched the tapestries with additional flowers, animals, and country scenes. But the most significant departure from the designs of Maarten de Vos is the addition of a wide border containing an unbroken rope of loops, 9 inches in diameter, which enclose two-part emblems, each separated from the next by a flower. The borders of the four panels of the tapestries contain no fewer than 170 emblems, each comprising a Latin motto and a circular picture. These emblematic borders are virtually without parallel in the history of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century European tapestry.— Since all the Spring emblems derive directly or indirectly from Alciato and Sambucus, and none is an original creation of Whitney, it seems reasonable to conclude that Hyckes drew on these two continental sources. A publisher of both Sambucus and some of the most influential Alciato editions was Christophe Plantin and so probably of the edition used by Hyckes. We know that Hyckes knew Latin and Greek, and he would therefore have had little difficulty with the Latin in the Alciato and Sambucus editions. Plantin also published the Whitney compilation, which drew heavily on the plates Plantin had already used for Alciato, Sambucus, and others.— An examination of the changes in the texts of the mottoes in the

Spring tapestry reveals that Francis Hyckes read his emblem sources very carefully and made modifications according to a clear conception of how the emblem works. Whereas Alciato composed his emblems with a cultured and humanistically educated reader in mind, Hyckes was producing a tapestry for a patron, Sir John Tracy of Toddington. The tapestry was presumably intended to adorn Sir John’s home as an object of significant beauty, but probably not as an intellectual puzzle. The Latin mottoes of the 170 emblems in the borders were intended to be understood by the educated visitor. With perhaps one or two exceptions, they were not intended as intellectual riddles. On the continent tapestry emblems were recognized as fulfilling a valuable educational and didactic function. Thus Andreas Maximillian Fredro recommended their use for the private apartments of rulers, where the emblems could serve as silent counsellors.— Reviewing the distribution of some of Alciato’s emblems in the tapestries, one finds the following pattern of usage: Spring has twenty Alciato emblems from a total of forty-two - that is, almost half derive from Alciato. Summer has nine Alciato emblems out of the forty-four. Autumn has eleven Alciato emblems out of the forty-two. Winter has twelve Alciato emblems of the forty-two. That means that out of a total of 170 emblematic border roundels no fewer than fifty-two derive from Alciato. In Hyckes’s selection of emblems, Alciato plays the largest role, accounting for almost a third of the total emblematic roundels. But Alciato’s emblems also served in more modest fashion in the decoration of trenchers, which were usually circular in shape, and often given as presents. Such wooden trenchers were used to serve cheese or fruit from the fifteenth to the late seventeenth centuries in Great Britain. We are indebted to Michael Bath and Malcolm Jones for detailed information. Bath describes two of seven oblong trenchers that copy Alciato emblems: “Mutuum auxilium” (Mutual help) depicting a blind man carrying on his back a lame man, and “Fidei symbolum” (Symbol of fidelity) with the figures of Truth, Honor, and Chaste Love. Bath is able to show

that the trencher designs are based on Wechel’s Paris editions of Alciato’s emblems. The designer evidently took hints for the coloring from Alciato’s epigrams, although he also used Mignault’s commentaries. As Bath observes, these trencher designs were “by no means simple or unthinking copies of available pattern books” (p. 365). That such trenchers were quite common at the time is revealed by Bath’s quotations from Puttenham, Harrington, Burton, and Donne.—

Notes 1 The fullest biography is by R. Abbondanza in Dizionario biográfico degli Italiani, vol. 2 (Rome, 1960), 69-77. For the bibliography of emblem studies, including Alciato, see the Companion to Emblem Studies, ed. P.M. Daly (New York, 2007), 519-99. 2 So called by Claude Chansonnette (Cantiuncula) in a letter to Cornelius Agrippa (Abbondanza, 74). 3 P. Laurens and F. Vuilleumier, “De l’archéologie à l’emblème: la genèse du Liber Alciati,” Revue de l’Art 101 (1963), 86-95. 4 Corpus inscriptionum latinorum (Berlin, 1877), I, 624. 5 Andreae Alciati contra vitam monasticam epistula: Andrea Alciato’s Letter

against Monastic

Life,

ed.

D.L.

Drysdall.

Supplementa

humanística lovaniensia xxxvi (L euven, 2014). 6 D. R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law and History in the French Renaissance (New York/London, 1970), ch. 4. 7 D.L. Drysdall, “Alciato and the Grammarians: The Law and the Humanities in the Parergon iuris libri duodecim,” Renaissance Quarterly 56:3 (2003), 695-722. 8 Most scholars who have treated the European emblem, from the

Victorian Henry Green (Andrea Alciati and His Books of Emblems [London, 1872]) to John Manning in the first years of this century, have also revisited the emblems of Alciato. The most recent reassessment of Alciato and his emblems is by D.L. Drysdall, “Andrea Alciato, Pater et Princeps,” in Companion to Emblem Studies (as in note 1), 79-97. 9 The most recent critical account of Alciato’s epigrams, their illustrations, and Alciato’s translation of the Greek Anthology is by R. Cummings, “Alciato’s Illustrated Epigrams,” Emblemática 15 (2007), 193-228. On the relation of Alciato’s emblems to the Greek Anthology, see also J. Hutton, The Greek Anthology in Italy to the Year 1800 (Ithaca, 1935); M. Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (Rome, 1964); A. Saunders, “Alciato

and the

Greek Anthology,”

Journal of Medieval and

Renaissance Studies 12:1 (1982), 1-18; V. Woods Callahan, “Uses of the Planudean Anthology: Thomas More and Andrea Alciato,” in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Bononiensis, ed. R. J. Shoeck (Binghampton, 1985), 399-408. 10 See the correspondence with Pietro Bembo: G.-L. Barni, Le Lettere di Andrea Alciato (Florence, 1953), no. 93, 156-57, 11. 11-18, February 25, 1535; and Petri Bembi cardinalis epistolarum familiarum, libri VI ... (Venice, Gualterus Scottus, 1552), 267-68, March 21, 1535. 11 D.L. Drysdall, “Epimetheus, An Alciati Companion (review of William S. Heckscher, The Princeton Alciati Companion)” Emblemática 4:2 (1989), 379-91. 12 D.L. Drysdall, “A Note on the Relationship of the Latin and Vernacular Translations of Horapollo from Fasanini to Caussin,” Emblemática 4:2 (1989), 225-41. 13 V.W. Callahan, “Erasmus’s Adages - A Pervasive Element in the Emblems of Alciato,” Emblemática 9:2 (1995), 241-56. 14 Praz, Studies (as in note 9), 12, 24. 15 A. Henkel and A. Schöne, Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst der XVI. und XVII. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1967). 16 An excellent survey of earlier discussions of this is provided by B. F.

Scholz,

“‘Libellum

composui

epigrammaton,

cui

titulum

feci

Emblemata’: Alciatus’s Use of the Expression Emblema Once Again,” Emblemática 1 (1986), 213-26. 17 Barni, Le Lettere (as in note 10), no. 24, 46,11. 28-35. 18 See contributions by Cummings, Illustrated Epigrams (as in note 9), and Hutton, Greek Anthology (as in note 9), Laurens and Vuilleumier, De l’archéologie à l’emblème (as in note 3), and M. Tung, “Alciato’s Practices of Imitation: A New Approach to Studying His Emblems,” Emblemática 19 (2012), 153-257. 19 D.L. Drysdall, “Occurrences of the Word ‘emblema’ in Printed Works before Alciato,” Emblemática 14 (2004), 299-325. 20 Barthélemy Aneau seems also to have envisaged this possibility: “que toutes et quantesfoys que aulcun voudra attribuer, ou pour le moins par fiction applicquer aux choses vuydes accomplissement, aux nues aornement, aux muetes parolle, aux brutes raison, il aura en ce petit livre (comme en ung cabinet tresbien garny) tout ce qu’il pourra, & vouldra inscripre, ou pindre aux murailles de la maison, aux verrieres, aux tapis, couvertures, tableaux, vaisseaulx, images, aneaulx, signetz, vestemens, tables, lictz, armes, brief à toute piece et utensile, & en tous lieux: affïn que l’essence des choses appartenantes au commun usage soit en tout, et par tout quasi vivement parlante, et au regard plaisante.” (Italics added.) 21 Alciato, De singulari certamine (Lyon, 1544). The first edition (unauthorized) was by Kerver (Paris, 1541). The earlier manuscripts seem to have been lost. See Barni, Le Lettere (as in note 10) no. 42, dated May 26, 1528. For a general account see M. Grünberg-Drôge, “The De singulari certamine liber in the Context of Its Time,” Emblemática 9:2 (1995), 315-41. Alciato’s source for the reference to the Mantineans is Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 4.154d. 22 Ibid., ch. 2, 7-8; ch. 37, 69; ch. 43, 81. 23 This has been identified by Agnes Kusler in an as yet unpublished piece of research as the obverse of a portrait medal of Gattinara made by

Christoph Weiditz in 1529. 24 W. Pirckheimer, Opera omnia (Frankfurt, 1610; repr. Hildesheim, 1969), 22. One of the dedicatory poems reveals that the illustration was executed by Dürer. The bookplate has been identified as no. 300b in Ilse O’Dell, Deutsche und Österreichische Exlibris 1500 - 1599 im Britischen Museum (London, 2003). The word occurs in each case in a text by the contributors to this seventeenth-century edition and the necessary proof that Pirckheimer himself used the term “emblema,” as the texts seem to imply, is yet to be found. 25 “De annulo expoliendo” [date unknown] in Carmina illustrium Poetarum Italorum, vol. 3, ed. J. Bottari (Florence, 1719-26), 105-06, 11. 29-30. 26 D.L. Drysdall, “Devices as ‘Emblems’ before 1531,” Emblemática 16 (2008), 253-69. 27 In Latin line 4 reads “Artificum illustri signaque facta manu”. 28 D.L. Drysdall, “The Emblems in Two Unnoticed Items of Alciato’s Correspondence,” Emblemática 11 (2001), 379-91, at 383 and 385, note 11. It is not known who Palma was nor is any letter to such a person extant. He was possibly Johann Bebelius, publisher of the 1529 Selecta epigrammata graeca, which included many translations by Alciato, and whose device was a palm tree. 29 The commentary grew from notes on the De verborum significatione when he lectured on it at Avignon in 1520-21 (Barni, Le Lettere, [as in note 10] no. 5, 12,1. 44); the accompanying treatise was added in 1528. 30 E. Klecker regards Alciato’s emblems as hieroglyphs. See “Des signes muets

aux

emblèmes

chanteurs:

les

Emblemata

d’Alciat

et

l’emblématique,” Littérature 145 (March 2007), 23-52. 31 Alciato, De verborum significatione (Lyon, S. Gryphius, 1530), 102. The lapidary formula, “Verba significant, res significantur,” is taken from Accursius: Glossa in Digestum Novum, Corpus Glossatorum IX (Turin, ex Officina Erasmiana, 1968), 558 (f. 280v of the original), gloss of Digest 12.1.6. In Amerbach’s manuscript notes of Alciato’s lectures (Basel,

Universitáts-bibliothek, ms. C VI 13, 34, col. 1), although the hieroglyphs are mentioned at this point, the reference to the emblems does not appear. 32 For “argumentum” as “genre” see J. Chomarat, Grammaire et rhétorique chezErasme, vol. 1 (Paris, 1981), 510 (3), 511 (10), 537 (159). 33 For example, that of Fasanini, who taught rhetoric at Bologna when Alciato was there completing his doctoral studies. See D.L. Drysdall, “Filippo Fasanini and His ‘Explanation of Sacred Letters,’” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13 (1983), 127-55 and “A Note on the Relationship of the Latin and Vernacular Translations of Horapollo from Fasanini to Caussin,” Emblemática 4:2 (1989), 225-41. 34 D.L. Drysdall, “The Hieroglyphs at Bologna,” Emblemática 2:2 (1987), 225-47. 35 Erasmus, Adagia Il.i.l (2001). This commentary appeared first in the Venice edition of 1508. 36 D.L. Drysdall, “The Hieroglyphs at Bologna” (as in note 34), 234-37. This understanding of the hieroglyphs seems to be compatible with that described by Laurens and Vuilleumier, De l’archéologie á l’embléme (as in note 3) in the context of Alciato’s epigraphical studies. 37 De verborum significatione, 39-40. See D.L. Drysdall, “A Lawyer’s Language Theory. Alciato’s De verborum significatione,” Emblemática 9:2 (1995), 269-92. 38 For linguistic theories of the period and knowledge of the commentaries of Ammonius Hermseus on Plato’s Cratylus and Aristotle’s On Interpretation, see M.A. Screech, Rabelais (London, 1979), 377-85. 39 The text had been published under the name of Fortunatianus in Hoc in volumine aurea haec opuscula continentur.... Dialéctica Chirii Consulti Fortunatiani... (Venice, Christophorus de Pensis, 1495). For Augustine see the translation by B. D. Jackson, Synthese Historical Library, vol. 16 (Dordrecht/Boston, 1975), 86-91. 40 A selection of English translations will be found in P.M. Daly and M.V.

Silcox (ed.) assisted by S. Cuttier, Index Emblematicus: Andreas Alciatus. Volume II: Emblems in Translation (Toronto, 1985). The German translation by Wolfgang Hunger was issued in a facsimile edition (Darmstadt, 1967 and 1980). The German texts of the translation by Jeremias Held are in A. Henkel and A. Schöne, Emblemata ... (as in note 15). A facsimile edition with introduction and indexes appears in the series Imago Figurata, vol. 4 (P.M. Daly, Jeremias Held, Liber Emblematum [Frankfurt, 1566] Imago Figurata, vol. 4 [Turnhout, 2007]). 41 J. Manning, The Emblems of Thomas Palmer: “Two Hundred Poosees,” Sloane MS 3794, AMS Studies in the Emblem 2 (New York, 1988), xiii. 42 1536, 1540, 1542, all containing the Latin as well. For a comparison of the three sixteenth-century French translations, see A. M. Saunders, “Sixteenth-Century French Translations of Alciati’s Emblemata,” French Studies 44 (1990), 271-88. 43 De Tournes’s Latin editions had contained two books since 1547 and continued to appear in this format until 1629 (Green Alciati and His Books of Emblems [as in note 8] no. 159). In 1614 the first book of his Latin edition contained Stockhamer’s Commentariola and the second notes based on Mignault’s commentaries. 44 See Manning, The Emblems of Thomas Palmer (as in note 41). 45 D.L. Drysdall, “Defence and Illustration of the German Language: Wolfgang Hunger’s Preface to Alciati’s Emblems (text and translation),” Emblemática 3 (1988), 137-60. S. Rowan notes, “Wolfgang Hunger studied under Zazius for a while after 1533, but he left for Bourges to finish his degree under Andrea Alciato” (Ulrich Zazius: A Jurist in the German Renaissance 1461-1535 [Frankfurt, 1987], 84). See also P.M. Daly, “The Intertextuality of Word and Image in Wolfgang Hunger’s German Translation of Alciato’s Emblematum liber,” in Intertextuality: German Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. I. Hoesterey and U. Weisstein (Columbia, SC, 1993), 30-46. 46 Held’s version has only now been offered in its entirety in a modern reprint. See P.M. Daly, Jeremias Held (as in note 40).

The colophon has 1567. 48 H. Green, Alciati and His Books of Emblems (as in note 8), indicates “130 only” (190). M. Rubensohn in Griechische Epigramme (Weimar, 1897) writes of 212 poems and 130 illustrations, while M. Tung, “Alciato’s Practices” (as in note 18), records a total of 132 with seven duplicates. We find 132 illustrations. Some copies are defective, and that will affect the number of emblems and illustrations present. 49 There are two variant versions of the “Parvam culinam” emblem (Held nos 162 & 163), and seventeen emblems of trees (Alciato has fourteen), with three versions of the “Cupressus” emblem (Held nos 200-2), two of the “Laurus” emblem (Held nos 203-4), and two of the “Quercus” emblem (Held nos 205-6), all of which are numbered separately. 50 See M. Tung, “Concordance” (as in note 16), 324 and 334. Rubensohn, Griechische Epigramme (as in notes 4-8), recognized that the “offensive” emblem is present as no. 83. 51 K.L. Selig, “The Spanish Translations of Alciato’s Emblemata,” Modern Language Notes 70 (1955), 354-59. See also P.F. Campa, Emblemata Hispanica: An Annotated Bibliography of Spanish Emblem Literature to the Year 1700 (Durham, 1990). 52 Green, Andrea Alciati (as in note 8), nos 41 and 42. 53 Green, Andrea Alciati (as in note 8), no. 155. 54 Green, Andrea Alciati (as in note 8), no. 151. 55 See Selig, The Spanish Translations (as in note 51), and Drysdall, “Wolfgang Hunger ...” (as in note 45). 56 In the 16mo edition of 1566 they are often shortened or even omitted, apparently for reasons of space. 57 Except “Adversus naturam peccantes.” 58 “On the Date of Composition of El Brocense’s Commentaria in Alciati Emblemata,” Emblematica 13 (2003), 73-96. 59 Not the author of the Guerra de Granada, who died in 1575.

60 See the text and translation of this commentary on the Glasgow emblem website: http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/Mignault intro.html. 61 There were many other editions with Mignault’s commentaries; we have mentioned only those that were important for their development. 62 For Pignorius’s corrections to the iconography of several emblems, see J. Manning, The Emblem (London, 2002), 116-18, 243, 256. 63 Daly attempted to deal generally with the emblem in the material culture in the Companion to Emblem Studies (New York, 2007), 411-56. 64 A.R. Young, “The English Tournament Imprese,” in The English Emblem and the Continental Tradition, ed. P.M. Daly (New York, 1988), 61-81. 65 A.R. Young, The English Tournament Imprese (New York, 1988) and his essay (as in note 64). See also his Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments (London, 1987). 66 See Works, ed. A.H. Bullen, 2 vols. (London, 1888), vol. 2, 283. 67 See Young, The English Tournament (as in note 65), no. 441. Many other tournament imprese make use of classical motifs, which may or may not derive from Alciato as an intermediary - for example, nos 63, 109, 162, and 461. 68 Published as The Diary of Baron Waldstein: A Traveller in Elizabethan England (London, 1981). The diary is translated and edited by G.W. Groos. 69 The emblem “Mutuum auxilium,” depicting a blind man and a lame man, had been printed in the first edition of Alciato’s emblems in 1531 (B2). The picture that Waldstein saw and described evidently still existed in 1649, since it had been transferred at some time from Whitehall Palace to Hampton Court, and had been listed in the inventory of Charles I’s possessions by Oliver Cromwell’s commissioners. See O. Millar (ed.), The Inventories and Valuations of the King's Goods, 16491651 (London, 1972). 70 See P.M. Daly, Alciato in England (New York, forthcoming). 71 See P.M. Daly and B. Hooper, “John Harvey’s Carved Mantle-Piece (c.

1570): An Early Instance of the Use of Alciato Emblems in England,” in Andrea Alciato and the Emblem Tradition: Essays in Honor of Virginia Woods Callahan, ed. P.M. Daly (New York, 1989), 177-204. Reprinted in the Saffron Walden Historical Journal 3:6 (Autumn, 2003), 2-13. 72 See P.C. Bayley, “The Summer Room Carvings,” University College Recorder 3 (1959), 192-200; 4 (1959), 252-56; 5 (i960), 341-46. 73 These are reproduced in P.M. Daly, “England and the Emblem: The Cultural Context of English Emblem Books,” in The English Emblem and the Continental Tradition, ed. P.M. Daly (New York, 1988), 40-41. 74 A.R. Young, “The Emblematic Decoration of Queen Elizabeth f s Warship the White Bear,” Emblemática 3 (1988), 45-77. 75 See His Majesty's Royal Ship: A Critical Edition of Thomas Heywood’s “A True Description of His Majesties Royall Ship,” ed. A.R. Young (New York, 1990), reviewed by M. Bath in Review of English Studies n.s. 43 (1992), 555-57. 76 These are numbered 11 and 17 in Young’s list as published in Emblemática 3 (1988), 69-70. 77 We are indebted to Mrs. Joan Kendall in charge of the restoration of the tapestries at Hatfield House for assistance in identifying some of the emblem motifs, which in the course of time have become worn and faint. Mr. Harcourt Williams, librarian and archivist at Hatfield House, was also kind enough to send his transcriptions of the mottoes. 78 This was established independently by both A.F. Kendrick, “The Elizabethan Sheldon Tapestry Maps,” Burlington Magazine 51, 161, and E.A.B. Barnard and A.J.B. Wace, “The Sheldon Tapestry Weavers and Their Work,” Archaeologia 78 (1928), 303. 79 In the later seventeenth century, French tapestry makers wove for the king two cycles of tapestries on the subject of the Four Elements and the Four Seasons, each adorned by eight emblems. See M. Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, 2nd ed. (Rome, 1964) (as in note 9), 334. 80 A fuller account, with juxtaposed illustrations of the tapestry emblems

with their book sources, where determinable, will be found in P.M. Daly, “The

Sheldon

‘Four

Seasons’

Tapestries

at

Hatfield House:

A

Seventeenth-Century Instance of Significant Emblematic Decoration in the English Decorative Arts” Emblemática 14 (2005), 251-96. 81 See A.M. Fredro, Scriptorum Seu Tages et Belli Notationum Selecta: Accesserunt Peristromata Regum Symbolis expresa (Frankfurt, 1660). The section dealing with the twenty tapestry emblems (reistromata), intended as a mirror of the prince, is found on pp. 251-412 in the 1685 edition. This information comes from the richly illustrated and informative catalogue of the emblem exhibition that was held in the Stift Gottweig in Lower Austria in 1977. The catalogue, which was still available in 1984, is entitled Stift Gottweig. EMBLEMATA. Zur barocken Symbolsprache. Nieder-óstereich: Stift Gottweig, 1977. Fredro’s work is item no. 21. 82 M. Bath, “Emblems from Alciato in Jacobean Trencher Decorations,” Emblemática 8 (1994), 359-70. See also M. Bath and M. Jones, “Emblems and Trencher Decorations: Further Examples,” Emblemática 10:1 (1996), 205-10.

2 Ripa? the Trinciante Cornelia Logemann

As a form of literary and pictorial expression, personifications have circulated since antiquity but they became increasingly significant in various media throughout Europe from the late medieval period onwards. In text, image, and theatre, human figures repeatedly came to exemplify abstract concepts. Yet few works had as great an impact on the depiction of personifications as Cesare Ripa’s Iconología, which first appeared in 1593. Little is known about the author. He was born between 1555 and 1560 in Perugia. While writing the Iconología, Ripa worked as a trinciante for Cardinal Lorenzo Salviati in RomeA He probably died 1622. These few known facts about Ripa stand in stark contrast to the rich contents of his book, which, with some additions, became his life’s work.- The first edition (from 1593), dedicated to Cardinal Salviati, describes a few hundred personified abstract concepts in alphabetical order (Fig. 2.1). The author addresses his readers with an extended foreword, where he gives a detailed explanation of his purpose: he is interested in those images that signify different things as can be seen with the eyes. In the proemio (the programmatical introduction), the reader is informed as to how allegorical images should be developed, and this is followed by the main part of the work, which has the descriptions of such imagini. As a handbook for dilettantes, artists, and literati, the imagini of

the Iconología eventually appeared in countless other contexts. Individual personifications were disseminated shortly after the publication of the second edition. By the middle of the seventeenth century, translations of the text had appeared in many European languages and spurred the multiplication and dissemination of the Iconología. It appeared in the New World and became an indispensable book for artists.- Even today, a standing human figure having some unusual attributes in art as well as kitsch, in political cartoons as well as everyday culture, carries Ripa’s visual signature and can easily be identified as a personification. It is possible that this success was probably less due to the intellectual influence Ripa displayed in his Roman milieu than to the fortunate circumstances of his book’s reception - and the concept of allegorical personification, which offered an easier approach to the hidden meanings in paintings and other artwork than the emblematic literature of that era. For the beholder, the emblem is a complex interaction of text and image and requires more knowledge and intellectual effort than the long-established technique of personification allegory. The first edition of the Iconología from 1593 was made up of a series of alphabetically arranged descriptions of abstract concepts that could be envisaged as personifications. Many of the figures listed there were already well established in Western visual culture but they adopted an entirely new appearance thanks to Ripa’s description. Natura, for example as found in Alain de Lille’s (d. c. 1202) writings, appears as a foster mother referring to ancient pagan traditions in Ripa’s catalog.- Several other figures in the Iconología departed entirely from the medieval tradition. In his proemio, Ripa attempted to outline a system for the invention of personifications, and consequently, he changed the medieval pictorial tradition for many abstract concepts.

• -k ■ ax vis ¡W 1^«SsVi ¡Kr' Oi

,?v item2; item2 -> item3; item3 -> item4; item4 -> item5; item5 -> iteml; item6 -> iteml; item7 -> item8; item8 -> item9; item9 -> iteml0; iteml0 -> iteml1; iteml1 -> iteml2; iteml2 -> item7; item6 -> item7; }

label="47:10"] r label="47:11"] r label="47:12"] r label="47:13"] r label="47:14"] r label="A:3"]; label="47:20"] r label="47:21"] r label="47:22-1 "] label="47:23" ] ; label="47:24" ] ; label="47:25" ];

All nodes and edges, but once visualized it is possible to construct graphs of the smallest units within the Atlas and work with them using such concepts as symmetry, interlocking, mirroring, multiple inheritance, groups, similarity, and so forth. The nodes are the images and/or texts, the arrows being what the historian describes and differentiates, having construed a historical opponent - in other words, the Mnemosyne Atlas: a laboratory for cultural history.

Notes 1 R. Chernow, The Warburgs: A Family Saga (London, 1995), 63. 2 Chernow, The Warburgs (as in note 1), 49. 3 Chernow, The Warburgs (as in note 1), 117. 4 Ibid. 5 Private communication with Prof. Gombrich (1989). When I wrote my PhD on the Mnemosyne Atlas (University of Leiden, 1992, unpublished) I read in Gombrich’s biography of Warburg that it was Saxl who had given him the idea of the screens. Saxl served in the Austrian army during the First World War and his unit used similar screens for communication purposes. As I could not find any physical evidence for this in the archives of the Warburg Institute, I pestered Gombrich with questions about the topic. One day I got a brief note from Gombrich stating, “You ask me how I know what you can’t find in the archives? I know because Saxl told me so.” That settled it! 6 K. Michels and C. Schoell-Glass, ‘Aby Warburg: Tagebuch Der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg Mit Einträgen von Gertrud Bing

Und

Fritz

Saxl\

A.

Warburg,

Gesammelte

Schriften

(Studienausagabe), Bd. VII (Berlin, 2001). 7 G. Bing, unpublished document, for private circulation (London, The

Warburg Institute, 1935), 5. 8 D. Wuttke, Aby M. Warburg: Ausgewählte Schriften Und Würdigungen. Saecula Spiritalia (Baden-Baden, 1979), 630-33. 9

A.M.

Warburg,

“Die

Erneurung

Der

Heidnischen

Antike.

Kulturwisschenschaftliche Beiträge Zur Geschichte Der Europäischen Renaissance,”

Reprint Der Ausgabe Leipzig/Berlin

1932,

ed.

H.

Bredekamp and M. Diers (Berlin, 1998), A. Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften (Studienausagabe), Bd. I. 1, 2. (Berlin, 1998). 10 See Michels and Schoell-Glass (Aby Warburg) (as in note 6). 11 M. Warnke and C. Brink, “Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne” A. Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften (Studienausagabe), Bd. II. 1 (Berlin, 2000). 12 Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften (as in note 9). 13 A. M. Warburg, “Matteo de’Strozzi: Ein Italienischer Kaufmanssohn Vor 500 Jahren,” Hamburger Weihnachtsbuch (1892), 236. 14 E.H. Gombrich and R. Saw, “Symposium: Art and the Language of the Emotions,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 36 (1962), 215-46. 15 D. Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York, 2011).

7

Fritz Saxl Transformation and reconfiguration of pagan gods in medieval art Katia Mazzucco

“Medieval Western art was [...] unwilling to retain a classical prototype without destroying either its original form, or [...] its original meaning [...]. Figures which were meant to represent Orion or Andromeda no longer looked like the Orion or Andromeda of classical times [;] thus, like the unfortunate lovers in a moving picture who await their reunion, classical subject matter and classical form were separated.” E. Panofsky and F. Saxl, Classical Mythology in Medieval Art

Fritz Saxl’s most important contribution to the iconography of medieval art can be identified in his work on the problem of the “after-life” (Nachleben) of antiquity. His contribution was an art historical and typological approach which focused on how forms survived from antiquity into the visual world of medieval Christianity. From his early research on manuscript illustrations, Saxl formulated the “principle of reintegration” of classical forms and contents into the Renaissance, a theory developed while discussing the history of the classical tradition, regarding astrological illustrations in medieval manuscripts and the language of expressional gestures in art. On the one hand, this theory anticipates, in counterpart, Panofsky’s much better known

“principle of disjunction” and, on the other hand, it developed out of a reinterpretation of Aby Warburg’s theory of “pathos formulae” (see the essays on Warburg and Panofsky elsewhere in this publication). Fritz Saxl (Vienna 1890-London 1948) (Fig, 7.1) studied art history and archaeology in Vienna, with Max Dvorak, Julius von Schlosser, and Franz Wickhoff, and in Berlin with Heinrich Wolfflin. In 1912 Saxl received his doctoral dissertation on Rembrandt under Dvorak,2 and in 1913 he became librarian and Aby Warburg’s personal assistant. Since then his name became and still is - “indissolubly linked”- with that of the Warburg Library (renamed Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg [KBW] between c. 1924 and 1933]) in Hamburg, and with the history and biography of its founder. “My core question [...] is the Nachleben of Antiquity in the Middle Ages,” wrote the young scholar to Warburg that very year.2 As a student, he was already cultivating his interest in the imagery of medieval astrology and the first fruit of this research was his paper on the “history of the representation of the Planets in the East and in the West” (1912).- Thanks to Warburg’s and Franz Boll’s2 support, he undertook a long series of research missions in the most important libraries in Europe and was able to start his work on the “catalogue of astrological and

Figure 7J_ Fritz Saxl in the reading room of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg, 1926-1927, unknown photographer. Image courtesy of the Warburg Institute, London.

mythological illuminated manuscripts of the Latin Middle Ages”: the first two volumes of Roman and Viennese manuscripts were published in 1915 and 1927;- the work continued with Hans Meier in London, and the posthumous volume on English manuscripts was published in 1953.- In the introduction to the first volume of the catalogue, the young scholar makes a clear methodological statement:

We are accustomed to examine the problem of the confrontation of the post-Carolingian Middle Ages with the pictorial heritage of Antiquity, so that, most of the time, we investigate the stylistic relations between works of art of the two periods. [...] We must not consider [the] problem under the aspect of the evolution of form only, but also under that specific medieval aspect that is the preeminent importance of the representation of content, in order to reach not a one-sided understanding of the role of the ancient visual inheritance in medieval intellectual life. The method is old and renowned: that is Iconography. [...] It is clear that iconographic inquiries, precisely in these fields of representation where ancient themes are illustrated, would feed our knowledge on the relationship between Antiquity and the Middle Ages more than investigating other fields of knowledge.-

The impact of Warburg’s approach on the young scholar’s work is obvious in this passage, and three critical points are obvious points that were later to become crucial issues in the developing field of iconological studies. First, it was necessary to study the forms of representation (circles, areas, or fields of representation, Darstellungskreise) of ancient subjects (themes, antike Themeri) in the manuscript tradition using classification, and through visual taxonomies. Second, he identified the Carolingian renascence as a critical moment, a watershed, not only for the history of the manuscript tradition and style but also for the history of illustrating antique themes, as was to develop in future studies on the renascences of the classics. Third, his main point assumed content as the most appropriated for understanding medieval art. This opposed a purely formal analysis, and Saxl suggested a “disjunction” between content and form, or between themes and motifs, in the art of the Middle Ages.In 1920 Fritz Saxl was asked to become acting director of the Warburg Library in Hamburg, while Aby Warburg was ill. According to Warburg’s wish, the library, created as a private collection, turned from 1922 into a research institute. It was aligned with the University of Hamburg, which was founded in

1921, and had attracted scholars such as Ernst Cassirer and Erwin Panofsky. In those years, the library which Warburg had collected was described by Saxl as a “question-library” (Problem-Bibliothek), with questions relating to the posthumous, or afterlife, of the antique (Nachleben der Antike) being at its core.— Saxl initiated two series of publications, collected studies (Studien) and lectures (Vorträge), in the library, and developed a new and original approach to the survival of pagan antiquity in Christian society as a “general historical discipline.”— His essay on Dürer’s Melancholia I, written with Erwin Panofsky and published as the second volume of the Studien, developed out of his work at this time.— In summer 1939, after many delays and interruptions, the proofs of a revised and enlarged edition of the work on Melancholia were ready, but the types were destroyed during the war. A new English and reformulated edition, this time with Raymond Klibansky, was finally published as Saturn and Melancholy (1964): the book has been described as the best example of the Warburg studies, a new science that, “differently from many other disciplines, exists, but has no name.”—

Figure 7.2 The Nike-Mithras type, F. Saxl, Mithras: Typengeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Berlin, 1931), figs. 31-36.

When Warburg died in 1929, Saxl became director of the Warburg Library. In the early thirties he published his work Mithras (1931),— considered to be one of his major contributions (Fig. 7.2). The work on Melancholia was subtitled “a sources- and typological-historical research”: here both word (sources) and image (typology of) worked together in tracing the history of that picture. In the “typological-historical inquiries” on Mithras, the methodological approach of the history of types - such as the types of Nike killing the bull and Perseus killing Medusa and their influences on the type of Mithras’s tauroctony - is used to trace the iconography of the ancient god within the fields of archaeology and history of religion. In these years, Fritz Saxl also published two important papers and a short monograph. These were his lecture on “expressional gestures of the visual art,” presented with a special photographic exhibition for the German Society of Psychology (1932);— the lecture on Classical Mythology in Medieval Art delivered at the Department of Fine Arts at Princeton University and published in 1933 with Erwin Panofsky;— and the essay on “Agostino Chigi’s astrological faith,” published in Italian in 1934.— In 1933 Saxl managed the move of the library from Hamburg to London, as he foresaw the impossibility of scholarship in Nazi Germany, especially for those institutions connected with Jewish scholars. “The last fourteen years of his life were devoted to grafting the tradition of the Warburg Institute (as it came to be called) into English intellectual life,”— and finally in 1944 the Institute was incorporated into the University of London. Fritz Saxl was then appointed professor of the history of the classical tradition of the University of London. Since then, that has implicitly been the “name” applied to these studies; Erwin Panofsky would go on to develop “iconological studies” in the United States.— There has been a rare, and not always clear, “synastria”—

between Warburg and Saxl, especially in their intellectual biographies. Contrary to the commonly held idea of the “devoted follower” renouncing his scholarship and shipping the Institute to safe waters, Saxl in fact never interrupted his own research.— While director, he went back to old ideas and renewed interests, such as Rembrandt,— and right up to the end of his life, he continued to research the Venetian Renaissance and medieval English art;— he published many papers and short notes in the English series of the Institute, and gave a number of lectures, collected after his death and published in two volumes (1957).— His many fields of interests and variety of approaches to the history of images are shown in this collection and in the number of its illustrations included. His work is best known through this publication as well as a later selection of his lectures:— much of the research from the Hamburg years has received only scant attention.—

A medieval diagram emblem of a “new science” The print Melancholia I by Albrecht Dürer seems to have taken on or assumed the role of icon or daemon for iconology. A totally different kind of image is the picture generally associated with the Warburg studies: that is the diagram “Mundus-Annus-Homo,” with the schematic intersections of the four elements, the four seasons, and the four temperaments. The diagram is included in the first edition of Isidore’s De responsione mundi et de astrorum ordinatione - more commonly known under the title De natura rerum - printed at Augsburg by Günther Zainer in 1472 (Fig. 7.3).— This graphic statement of the Middle Ages translates the doctrine of cosmic harmony into a visual instruction. The diagrammatic depiction of the microcosm-

macrocosm analogy, originally introduced in Isidore’s manuscripts, was repeatedly copied in the following centuries and his De natura rerum was often given the title of “liber rotarum”: wheel schemata were used to express textual correlations graphically.— Fritz Saxl’s interest in these diagrammatic depictions is obvious in his research on manuscript illustration, the theory of four humors, the illustrated medieval encyclopedias, and the tradition of macrocosm and microcosm in medieval pictures.— He remarked in 1923 in a letter to Adolph Goldschmidt how Isidore could be considered the source for almost all secular imagery of the Middle Ages.— The reproduction of the xylography from the Zainer edition became the logo of the Institute’s English publications, Studies and Lectures, and the diagram still stands above the entrance to the Warburg Institute building in London’s Woburn Square, completed in 1958. A graphic re-elaboration of the tetragram is also found on the Warburg Library webpage; each of the four elements was assigned to one of the thematic sections of the Library: “Image” corresponds to earth (Terra); “Word” to water (Aqua); “Orientation” to air (Aer); “Action” to fire (Ignis).—

Figure 7J The Mundus-Annus-Homo diagram, Isidore’s De responsione mundi et de astrorum ordinatione, Günther Zainer Augsburg 1472; A. Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke (Leipzig, 1920), fig. 292.

In looking at the origins of the Warburg Institute’s emblem, it first occurs in the first prospectus of the library - reopened in Thames House after the move from Hamburg. The prospectus was drafted in 1934 by Gertrud Bing, Fritz Saxl, and Edgar Wind.— The book collection was described in the leaflet according to a tetradic system of four sections: “Religion, Natural Science, and Philosophy”; “Language and Literature”; “Fine Arts”; “Social and Political Life.” As a correlate of the book collection, and as a resource and research tool, the prospectus includes the scheme of the photographic collection, organized in two sections: “Astrological and Mythological Manuscripts” and “Iconography of

Classical Subjects in Medieval and Modern Painting, Sculpture and Applied Arts, including Festivals.”— The system of the four thematic sections of the library - and its different Aufstellungen (dispositions) during the early years and travels of the library— - goes back to the first arrangement planned for the four stockrooms of the newly built library building in Hamburg, which was completed in 1926. Aby Warburg wrote, Reading room: reference library and journals. Stock rooms: 1. History of Art; 2. Postumous life of the Antique in Religion, Science and Education; 3. History [...] and history of literature; 4. Sociology, Trade, recent political history, World War, Newspapers; 5. History of Festivals and Theatre and Dutch cultural history of the XVII century.—

The scheme also reflects the status of Warburg’s personal research - section “5” (planned to be stored on the fourth floor, with section “4”) included material for research then in progress - and highlights the mosaic nature of the question-library, organized according to themes, and accessible according to this logic. A document shows the existence of a plan for the library system as being organized into four main sections and substantially corresponds to this draft by Warburg. It dates to after 1926 and the rearrangement of the collections in the new building. Saxl can be identified as the author of this systematic arrangement, which follows Warburg’s original ideas. The document is a kind of prospectus - possibly a leaflet or panel - and shows the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg’s (KBW) specific resources, in word - the books - and image - the pictures. The prospectus is the first example of the four headwords together as a series, associated with the four sections: Image (Bild); Orientation (Orientierung); Word (Worf); Action (Handlung). This scheme was initially planned to also be the basis for classifying the Warburg image collection (Bildersammlung). It was to be the same system: Image (Bild); Word and Image (Wort und Bild); Orientation and

Image (Orientierung un Bild); Action and Image (Handlung und Bild).— As far as medieval art is specifically concerned, most of the subcategories of the system also have a thematic logic. For instance, under the category “Image,” the subcategories “Theory of Image Shaping (Theorie der Bildgestaltung),” “Literary Sources for the History of Image (Literarische Quellen zur Bildgeschichte),” and “Applied Arts (Kunstgewerbe)” include a large chronological range, and do not follow a specific stylistic periodization. Within this same main category (“Image”), two subcategories focus specifically on medieval art: “Early Christian Art (Altchristliche Kunsf)” and “Miniatures (Miniaturen)” - the latter also having a special morphological value, as a genre and as an art technique, and also exhibiting a special relationship with the history of the book. Within the image collection, and specifically within the third main category “Orientation and Image,” there is a nice convergence of Warburg’s and Saxl’s interests. The subcategory “Magic Practice and Divination” includes pictures of the “CosmosMan (Kosmosmanri),” “Images of Temperaments,” pictures of the practice of “Fortune Telling” (Epatoscopy, Wahrsageleber), of “Wonders (Monstra),” “Comets,” “Lapidaries,” and “Cards.” The following subcategory “Cosmology” includes pictures of “Ancient Gods and Myths as Heavenly Bodies (catasterization, Verstirnung),” such as “Constellations” and “Planets,” and “Images of the Planets and Their Children” and “Images of the Months.” It is possible to compare the two subcategories with the range of visual documentation collected for research on the fresco cycle in Schifanoia and on “Words and Images in the Age of Luther” by Warburg,— and to many of the aforementioned publications by Saxl on the tradition of the astrological pictures. The tetradic scheme is also documented in a later text, again by Fritz Saxl, and drafted around 1931,— another crucial moment in the history of the library, after its founder’s death and before the move to London. This version shows no modification in content,

but a shift between the two sections “Orientation” and “Image,” resulting in the series Orientation - Image - Word - Action. The first English arrangement of the Library, as can be read in the 1934 prospectus as well as in two articles, by Gertrud Bing and Edgar Wind respectively,— is not simply a translation of the system invented by Warburg and systematized by Saxl during the Hamburg years. It shows a different layout of the four main sections; it is different from the one originally planned in 1926, and from the variant proposed circa 1931, and from the future arrangement in the building in Woburn Square (after 1958); no mention is made of the four headwords. In the first London arrangement, the section corresponding to “Image” shifted position in the sequence of the four terms, resulting in this series: first section, “Religion, Natural Science and Philosophy” (ex Orientation); second section, “Language and Literature” (ex Word); third section, “Fine Arts” (ex Image); fourth section, “Social and Political Life” (ex Action). Furthermore, and most interesting, the system is simplified both in structure and in terminology. Many subcategories are incorporated - as for instance within the section “Fine Arts” (seven subcategories) versus Bild (seventeen subcategories). The theoretical subcategories that were first propaedeutic subcategories in each of the German main sections are suppressed - as for instance the first subcategory of the section Bild, called “Theory of the Image-Shaping / Aesthetic” (Theorie der Bildgestaltung / Aesthetik) and the first subcategory of the section Orientierung, devoted to the theory of symbols. The methodological approach is also totally different: the section Handlung, originally organized according to the three subcategories “Theoretical Basis” (theoretische Grundlage), “Historical Basis” (geschichtliche Grundlage), and “Morphology of Social Life” (Morphologie des sozialen Leberi), corresponds in the 1934 arrangement to the section “Social and Political Life,” including the four subcategories “Methods of History and Sociology,” “History of Social and Political Institutions,” “Folklore

and Performing Arts,” and “Forms of Social Administration and Legal and Political Theory.” “The outlines of the library [were] as a whole determined [...] but within these limits it [has grown] as the research work gradually [has covered] historical areas [that were] not yet represented”:— in the course of the dialogue and adaptation to the Anglo-Saxon academic approach, the system proved to be “flexible enough to adjust to any forthcoming development of research.”— Medieval and in particular Christian art finds a large place in this process, both in the four main sections of the book collection and in the image collections. The latter was in fact organized according to the two main categories of “Astrological and Mythological Manuscripts” and “Iconography of Classical Subjects in Medieval and Modern Painting, Sculpture and Applied Arts, including Festivals”: among the “new” subcategories was that of “Religious Iconography” (Fig. 7.4).

Figure 7_A Photograph showing Saint Jerome, dating to the mid-fifteenth century, hand-colored woodcut, first stamped “Bibliothek Warburg/Hamburg 20/114 Heilwigstrasse” (old building of the library;

before 1926), and afterwards stamped in London “The Warburg Institute” (no address; no affiliation with the University of London; 1933-1944) and catalogued according to the new section “Religious Iconography,” The Warburg Institute.

Constellations, gestures: a visual principle of reformulation In the last few decades, thanks to critical reception, translations, and recent research, Saxl’s original work on the reintegration of the classical style and iconography into the Renaissance has been widely recognized.— A crucial question as to what distinguishes the Renaissance in respect to older revivals of antiquity was raised. In the second volume of his “catalogue of astrological and mythological illuminated manuscripts of the Latin Middle Ages” Saxl discussed the iconographie tradition from antiquity, through to the end of the Middle Ages - looking at Latin and Arabic lines of transmission - that led to the Renaissance representation of constellations; he dealt with the ways the antique was revived and the special status of the “real” Renaissance of antiquity. The original classical elements of the constellation images - style and form; exactness in representing astronomical elements, such as the number and position of the stars within the scheme of the constellation; forms of the process of catasterization, or correct representation of the mythological aspects of the astronomical “bodies” - were not combined with each other, or even lost, during Middle Ages but were fully reintegrated only in the Renaissance.— This “principle of reintegration” can be read as the counterpart to the much better-known “principle of disjunction,” developed and discussed by Erwin Panofsky in Renaissance and Renascences.— Focusing on early revivals of classical art during the Middle Ages, such as the “Carolingian renascence,” Panosky first

suggested the idea in his article “Classical Mythology in Medieval Art,” which was written with Fritz Saxl. The “principle of disjunction,” decontextualized from studies of the classical tradition, had in itself a varied history. This included reformulations and applications to different fields of study, such as the history of the art of Mesoamerican antiquity or the analysis of knowledge models in microhistory. The first reference is the review of Panofsky’s Renaissance and Renascences published by Georg Kubier in 1961, and Kubler’s article “Renascence and Disjunction in the Art of Mesoamerican Antiquity.”— According to Kubier, the survival of ancient artistic forms after the period in which they were realized/produced does not mean that they preserved their original meaning, and, with the passing of time, different or even new forms may be attributed to ancient themes or subjects. Kubier traced the origin of the principle to a lecture by Adolf Goldschmidt on the Nachleben of ancient forms in the Middle Ages published in the first issue of the Vorträge des Bibliothek Warburg,— and then he reassigned it to the “Life of Forms,” published in 1934 by Henry Focillon.— The lineage traced by Kubier, and his application of the principle to Mesoamerican antiquity, drew a polygenetic map of the principle, dating to the start of the 1930s. A different theoretical perspective on the “principle of disjunction” is that of microhistory, which relates to Warburg’s studies and German image theories of the 1920s and 1930s. The narrative and vision of history and time are again at the core of the issue. In an article written about Siegfried Kracauer’s last and posthumously published book,— Carlo Ginzburg drew attention to the connection between attentiveness to the minutiae of microhistory and the principle of disjunction,— as quoted in Kracauer. “Emphasis on Minutiae - Close Up - Micro-analysis” is the title of a page of notes by Kracauer for his posthumous book.— Kracauer mentioned the “principle of disjunction” as example of close-up - that is, a way of seeing, in this specific case, in detail,

presented as “paradigmatic instance of micro histories” or “smallscale histories.” Photography is used by Kracauer as a paragon and it is implicitly interpreted as a “cognitive possibility,” stressed Ginzburg. In this sense and within this intellectual context, Ginzburg, in its turn, implicitly questions how far photography, as a “cognitive possibility,” can be considered a “symbolical form” as the invention of perspective in early Renaissance.— When looking at the “principle of disjunction,” Ginzburg doesn’t quote the article on classical mythology but only refers to its broader development in Renaissance and Renascences, and summarizes it as “the difference, commonly found in medieval art, between classical subjects represented anachronistically and images from antiquity that have been Christianized.” Let us go back to Saxl and his contribution to the creation of this principle, in relation to the iconography of medieval art. Despite the vast critical bibliography on the Warburg Library, or that on the foundation of iconological studies, or the fruitful theoretical inventions of the Warburg Kreis, little attention has been given to the “disjunction principle” and Saxl’s work as librarian for the arrangement and classification of both the Warburg Bucher- and Bildersammlung. One significant trace of Saxl’s work in the systematization of the book and image collections dates to the fall of 1927. Fritz Saxl was then deputy director of the library while Warburg was in Italy visiting the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. The collection of pictures of the KBW, under the collaborative work of Saxl with Edgar Breitenbach and Franz Alber, was then in the process of classification, using a scheme that anticipated the one described in the 1934 English prospectus of the Warburg photographic collection (Astrological and Mythological Manuscripts; Iconography of Classical Subjects). There are many notes about the photographic collection dating to around 1927 which mention astrological images, mainly from manuscripts, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, reference is made to the “systematic

collection” that, though not born out by any visual documents or schemes or descriptions, is still possible to visualize as an iconographic collection covering Warburg’s research material and other material of a more encyclopedic coverage.— This is borne out by the notes and working diary of the library as well as general correspondence. This shows that the work in the image collection was inextricably connected to the visual material in Warburg’s last work, the atlas of Mnemosyne. An extract from the work in progress on pictures by Saxl and library assistants was given the title “Atlas of the Language of Gestures.” This atlas by Saxl was composed of diagrams and notes and in all probability had a display of pictures, but it has been dispersed and is currently identifiable only in a series of fragmentary documents. The first of these documents is a folder with a label annotated by Warburg “Fritz Saxl and Breitenbach, Atlas of the language of gestures, Fall 1927.”— In August 1928, while working on his visual atlas, Warburg made some notes in the library’s working diary referring to this collection as the “Saxl-Breitenbach materials,” which were to be incorporated in Mnemosyne.— Another document is a different folder with many pages of diagrams ascribable to Fritz Saxl and Edgar Breitenbach - to which, in fact, the work on the “systematic collection” was assigned— - and has notes by Warburg himself.— The horizontal diagrams, which are possible instructions for displaying pictures on a board or panel, consist of squares with annotations referring to single works of art, neatly disposed in chronological order and classified thematically in three main categories: first, pagan gods and their Nachleben, as for instance “Atlas,” “Hercules,” and “Fortuna”; second, motives and pathos formulae (Pathosformeln), such as “Abduction” (Raufy, “Pursuit” (Verfolgung), “Triumph,” and “grasping the head” (Griff nach dem Kopf); third, individual figures and scenes, as for example “Ninfa” and “philosophical dialogue.” Some of these pictures, and further documentation on the work as coordinated by Saxl for the photographic collection, is documented in other

folders in the photographic collection of the Warburg Institute. One of the oldest sections in the collection is in fact devoted to “Gestures.” This same classification system is described in detail by Saxl in a report written in November 1927 for Warburg, who was in Florence at the Kunsthistorisches Institut. Saxl was reporting on the work in progress in the library, and his letter deals with books, images, research missions, and the Atlas.— This scheme should in fact be seen as Saxl’s personal interpretation of the Atlas of Mnemosyne but it is also, at the same time, inextricably connected to the general organization of the image collection in the library. It shows the first steps and early stages of the iconographic scheme that was to be applied to the collection in London. Saxl’s three main classification groups are illuminating and reflect his interest in antique forms and their tradition in the Middle Ages: 1. The reconfiguration (Gestaltwandel) of the ancient gods as Olympians and demons in the Middle Ages and the restitution (Restitution) of their ancient forms in the Renaissance. 2. Tradition and reception (Rezeption) of the ancient pathos formulae (Pathosformelri) in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance. 3. Transformation (Formwandel) of individual ancient figures (antiker Gestalten) into pictorial forms (Bildformen) in Middle Ages and Renaissance.— This schematic arrangement contains both Warburg’s “pathos formulae” and Saxl’s original interpretations and formulations and, though written for the singular purpose of reporting and indexing, it is a rare example of a theoretical scheme from Saxl’s work. It is possible to read the Gestaltwandel as a process of medieval shapeshifting, reshaping, or reconfiguring ancient deities, which were later reintegrated into the Renaissance with their original forms - such as the sub-category “Fortune” and the

related examples “with the wheel,” “with the cornucopia,” “with the sail,” and “with the forelock.”— The second category can be read as a partial catalogue of Warburgian Pathosformeln schematized according to expressional gestures, such as “Mourning” and “Grasping the head.”— In Warburg’s work the attention focuses on anachronistic or “shocking” and decontextualized occurrences of ancient formulae of pathos, and on their carsic historical paths; on the contrary, Saxl’s sentence implies a sort of uninterrupted line of tradition, with a fluid passage through centuries of reception. The third main section includes Saxl’s contribution to defining a paradigmatic figure of Warburg’s research on patterns of tradition - the “Nymph.” Also included is an attempt to identify other examples of ancient subjects which were similarly transformed into “image-forms” (Bildformen) in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Formwandel describes the transformation of ancient figures circumscribing an articulated range of themes, expressive attitudes, and formal solutions - for example, the “Nymph” as “pensive Muse” or as “Angel.” The short index to this section includes only three subcategories: individual figures such as the “Nymph” or the “Thinker,” and one single scene - namely, “Man and the Environment.” In its turn, the latter subcategory includes “Man and the Beast” (such as “Meleager’s Hunt” and “Temptations of St. Anthony”), “the Image of Rome,” and a most interesting invention by Saxl - that is, the concept of “formula” applied not to the expressions of pathos but instead to a nonfigurative genre the “Landscape-formulae.”— The terms Gestalt- and Formwandel hint at a sort of protean quality to ancient figures within the visual world of the Middle Ages, and not simply a failure within medieval art to attribute genuine ancient forms to ancient content. The scheme was evidently not considered complete or finished, nor was it intended as a general theoretical instruction about the dynamics of tradition. However, it may be interesting to compare the use of

these classification terms to describe, and visualize, the reinventions of the ancient tradition, with the term Pseudomorphosis as suggested by Panofsky in Studies in Iconology (1939). Pseudomorphosis describes a process of hybridization of the medieval elements of an ancient figure, being reconfigured in the Middle Ages, with reintegrated classical elements from the Renaissance, resulting in a renewed figure which still has false, misunderstood, or mysterious ancient attributes. Panofsky introduced the term when referring to the figure of “Father Time” - a hybrid of the reinterpreted ancient figures of Chronos/Time and Kronos/Saturn.— Significantly, the index drafted by Saxl arranges different subject matters according to the three main categories, and includes only a few references to style or periodization, such as that within the subcategories related to “Saturn.” The subcategories “in Ancient Shape (antikisierend)” “Medieval Costume (Verkleidung),” “Devouring Children,” and “on the dragon chariot” are included in the first main section of Gestaltwandel. The debate has other contributors that include Oswald Spengler, who first used the term Pseudomorphosis (1918, 1922), adapting it from mineralogy to explain the partial or failed integration of a young culture with an older and deep-rooted one, resulting in a distortion of natural development and of the expressive forms of the first one.— The debate also includes Adolph Goldschmidt’s concept of the “disintegration of forms” (Formenspaltung), or the morphological dissociation and geographical separation of forms developed in places removed from their origins, and discussed in a lecture delivered at Harvard University in 1936.— Furthermore, the concept has been contextualized in the debate on the “geography of art,” referring to the work of George Kubler on the idea of “provincial style” and Jan Bialostocki’s research on artistic development in Eastern Europe.— Finally, the last reference to Saxl’s atlas is his lecture on “expressional gestures” delivered at the Congress of Psychology in

Hamburg, and for which a small photographic exhibition was arranged. Planned as a visual display of Warburg’s approach, the exhibition was possibly an exemplification of the “atlas of gestures” drafted in 1927: We have arranged here, on the walls, a number of Renaissance works of art, of whose so-called dependence from ancient works has to be kept in mind. The panels are mainly arranged so that above is displayed the ancient work of art, then its medieval conversions (Umformungeri) and, finally, the restitution of the ancient formula in the art of the Renaissance.—

The text of the lecture includes a discussion on the relationships between ancient types, such as Mithras, and their conversion in medieval art, such as Samson defeating the lion according to the Mithras type, and restitution in the Renaissance of the original themes - Renaissance Mithras in his ancient form.— The exhibition was organized in sections according to the following subjects (Fig, 7.5): “Maenad and Satyr”; “Lamentation”; “Conclamatio”; “Medusa and the Devil Grimace”; “The Tragic Mask in the Physiognomic of Schrines - The Grotesque of the Ancient Comedy in the Physiognomic of Evil”; “Death and Healing”; “Flight and Triumph”; “Round Dance of Salome”; “Glancing Upwards Inspired”; “Grasping the Head”; “Dream and Meditation”; “Gesture of Defence of the Overwhelmed Figure”; “Pursuit and Fleeing”; “Glancing Upwards in Pain.”— Nearly all the panels had three lines of examples in each section, corresponding respectively, from top to bottom, to ancient, medieval, and Renaissance works of art. The relationship among the different works is typological, and the dynamics of copying is not examined. In the display layout, it is possible to clearly read disjunction rows (“AN[tike]” and “M[ittel]A[lter]”) and reintegration rows (“AN [tike]” and “RE[naissance]”). The lecture on “Classical Mythology in Medieval Art” was delivered in Princeton the following year, and spread even further the principle of disjunction in “classical subject matter” and “classical form” - discussed, formulated, and

visualized in research rooted in the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg and in the Kunstgeschichtliches Seminar of the University of Hamburg.— The history of the Warburg Library and Saxl’s career continues in the United Kingdom, but his role in establishing academic art historical studies in that country has not yet been properly outlined. Here Saxl, who defined himself “not a philosopher,” nor one “able to talk about the philosophy of history,” but rather a scholar attracted by “the concrete historical material,” would have developed his own art historical approach to the “history of images”: “Images with a meaning peculiar to their own time and place, once created, have a magnetic power to attract other ideas into their sphere; [...] they can suddenly be forgotten and remembered again after centuries of oblivion.”—

Figure 7_5 Photographic exhibition in the reading room of the KBW for Saxl’s lecture “The Expressional Gestures of the Visual Art,” 1931. Image courtesy of the Warburg Institute, London.

Notes 1 F. Saxl, Rembrandt-Studien, unpublished dissertation, University of Vienna (1911). 2 G. Bing, “Fritz Saxl: January 8th, 1890-March 22nd, 1948,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 10 (1947); for a detailed Saxl biography and bibliography see D. McEwan, Fritz Saxl. Eine Biografie: Aby Warburgs Bibliothekar und Erster Direktor des Londoner Warburg Institutes (Vienna/Köln/Weimar, 2012). 3 Warburg Institute Archive (WIA), General Correspondence (GC), Fritz Saxl to Aby Warburg, 13/09/1913; see McEwan, Fritz Saxl (as in note 2), 83-84. The catalogue of the WIA is in progress, edited by C. Wedepohl; all the references should therefore be considered provisionals. The interpretation of the documents related to the “atlas of gesture” by Saxl and Breitenbach is mine (see notes 53-58). 4 F. Saxl, “Beiträge zu einer Geschichte der Planetendarstellungen im Orient

und

im

Okzident,”

Islam

3

(1912),

151-77.

On

Saxl’s

interpretation of the planets iconography cf. D. Blume, Regenten des Himmels: Astrologische Bilder in Mittelalter und Renaissance (Berlin, 2000), 201-02. 5 F. Boll, Sphaera. Neue griechische Texte un Untersuchingen zur Geschichte der Sternbilder (Leipzig, 1903). 6 F. Saxl, Verzeichnis astrologischer und mythologischer illustrierter Handschriften des lateinischen Mittelalters in römischen Bibliotheken (Heidelberg,

1915);

F.

Saxl,

Verzeichnis

astrologischer

und

mythologischer illustrierter Handschriften des lateinischen Mittelalters der National-Bibliothek in Wien (Heidelberg, 1927). 7 F. Saxl and H. Meier, Verzeichnis astrologischer und mythologischer illustrierter Handschriften des lateinischen Mittelalters in englischen Biliotheken - Catalogue of Astrological and Mythological Illuminated Manuscripts of the Latin Middle Ages in English Libraries, ed. H. Bober (London, 1953). Cf. the fourth volume: P. McGurk, Catalogue of

Astrological and Mythological Illuminated Manuscripts of the Latin Middle Ages in Italian Libraries (other than Rome) (London, 1966). 8 F. Saxl, Einführung, in Handschriften 1915 (as in note 6), V-VII. 9 This point has been remarked by Salvatore Settis, who has included the first - and only - translation, though partial, of the introductory texts of Saxl, Handschriften 1915, 1927 (as in note 6) within the selection of Saxl’s lectures he edited in 1985: F. Saxl, La fede negli astri. Dall’antichitä al Rinascimento, ed. S. Settis (Turin, 1985); cf. S. Settis “Introduzione,” 35-40. 10 F. Saxl, “Das Nachleben der Antike: Zur Einführung in die Bibliothek Warburg,” Hamburger Universitäts-Zeitung II, 11, 1920-21 (1921), 24447; F. Saxl, “Die Bibliothek Warburg und ihr Ziel,” in Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg 1, 1921-1922 (1923), 1-10. 11 Bing, “Fritz Saxl” (as in note 2). 12 E. Panofsky and F. Saxl, “Dürer’s ‘Melancholia F: Eine quellen- und typengeschichtliche Untersuchung,” Studien der Bibliothek Warburg 2 (Berlin,

1923);

expanded and translated into English with the

collaboration of Raymond Klibansky as Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London, 1964). Cf. Warburg’s interpretation of Melancholia in A. Warburg, “Heidnisch­ antike

Weissagung

Sitzungsberichte

der

in

Wort

Heidelberg

und

Bild

Akademie

zu der

Luthers

Zeiten,”

Wissenschaften,

Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Jahrgang 1920, 26, Heidelberg 1920. 13 R. Klein, La forme et l’intelligible (Paris, 1970), 224. Cf. the essay by Giorgio Agamben “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science” (1975, 1984), Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford, 1999), 89-103. 14 F. Saxl, Mithras: Typengeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Berlin, 1931). 15 F. Saxl, “Die Ausdrucksgebärden der bildenden Kunst,” Bericht über den XII. Kongreß der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Psychologie in Hamburg, April 12-16,

1931, Im Auftrage der Deutschen Gesellschaft für

Psychologie, ed. G. Kafka (Jena, 1932), 13-25; rpt. F. Saxl, Gebärde, Form,

Ausdruck: zwei Untersuchungen, ed. Pablo Schneider (Zurich, 2012); cf. F. Saxl, “I gesti espressivi nell’arte figurativa,” and C. Cieri Via, “Una nota biográfica alfombra di Aby Warburg,” Annali di Critica d’arte VIII (2012), 9-23, 25-41. 16 E. Panofsky and F. Saxl, “Classical Mythology in Medieval Art,” Metropolitan Museum Studies 4, 1932-33 (1933), 228-80; see E. Panofsky and F. Saxl, Mitología classica nell’arte medievale, ed. C. Cieri Via (Torino, 2012). 17 F. Saxl, La fede astrológica di Agostino Chigi (Rome, 1934). Following Warburg’s thesis on the fresco cycle by Peruzzi (c. 1511), Saxl interpreted the Loggia Farnesina ceiling as horoscope of Agostino Chigi. 18 Bing, “Fritz Saxl” (as in note 2). 19 E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York, 1939). 20 G. Bing, “Fritz Saxl (1890-1948),” in Fritz Saxl: A Volume of Memorial Essays, ed. D.J. Gordon (London, 1957), 1-46 (6). 21 Bing, “Fritz Saxl” (as in note 2) and E.H. Gombrich “Introduction,” in A Heritage of Images: A Selection of Lectures by Fritz Saxl, ed. H. Honour and J. Fleming (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1970), 10. 22 F. Saxl, “Rembrandt’s Sacrifice of Manoah,” Studies of the Warburg Institute 9 (London, 1939). 23 R. Wittkower and F. Saxl, British Art and the Mediterranean (New York/Oxford, 1948); F. Saxl, English Sculptures of the Twelfth Century (London, 1954). 24 F. Saxl, Lectures, 2 vols. (London, 1957). 25 A Heritage of Images (as in note 21). 26 On Saxl’s inedited works cf. among the recent researches by Karin Hellwig on Saxl and Spanish art: Aby Warburg und Fritz Saxl enträtseln Velázquez: Ein spanisches Intermezzo zum Nachleben der Antike (Berlin, 2015).

27 A. Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke, vol. 2 (Leipzig, 1920), pl. 34, fig. 292. 28 On the history of these diagrams see Isidore de Seville, “Traité de la nature,” in Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Étude Hispaniques 28, ed. J. Fontaine (Bordeaux, 1960). 29 Saxl, Handschriften (as in note 6), “Macrocosm and Microcosm in Medieval Pictures” (1927-28), Lectures (as in note 24), vol. 1, 58-72. 30 WIA, GC, Fritz Saxl to Adolph Goldschmidt, 06/02/1923. 31 http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/library/maps/; The graphic re-elaboration of the emblem, with sections of the library associated with the four elements, is no longer the webpage logo of the Institute; a new logo was launched in Spring 2016. 32 WIA 1.13.3.5, The Warburg Institute: Collection of Book and Photographs, Thames House prospectus including list of resources and opening times, 1934; WIA 1.13.3.5.1 draft prospectus, typescript with handwritten notes by G. Bing, F. Saxl, and E. Wind, 4 fols. 33 WIA 1.13.3.5, The Warburg Institute (as in note 32); cf. G. Bing, “The Warburg Institute,” The Library Association Record 4:1 (1934), 262-66, and E. Wind, “The Warburg Institute Classification Scheme,” The Library Association Record 2:5 (1935), 193-95. In 1934 Rudolf Wittkower was

responsible

for

the

icono-graphic

rearrangement

of

the

photographic collection (The Warburg Institute Annual Report, 1934); cf. K. Mazzucco, “L’iconoteca Warburg di Amburgo: Documenti per una storia della Photographic Collection del Warburg Institute,” Quaderni Storici 3 (December 2012), 857-87; and K. Mazzucco, “Images on the Move: Some Notes on the Bibliothek Warburg Bildersammlung (Hamburg)

and

the

Warburg

Institute

Photographic

Collection

(London),” Art Libraries Journal 38:4 (2013), 16-24. 34 The Aufstellungen of the Warburg Library have been largely debated; among the related bibliography see S. Settis, “Warburg continuatus: Descrizione di una biblioteca,” Quaderni storici 58 (1985), 5-38, and cf. “Nota finale,” S. Settis, Warburg continuatus. Descripción de una

biblioteca

(Madrid,

2010);

T.

von

Stock-hausen,

Die

Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg: Architektur, Einrichtung und Organisation (Hamburg, 1992); M.S. Diers, Porträt aus Büchern: Bibliothek

Warburg

und

Warburg

Institute,

Hamburg-London

(Hamburg, 1993); H.M. Schäfer, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg: Geschichte und Persönlichkeiten der Bibliothek Warburg mit Berücksichtigung der Bibliothekslandschaft und der Stadtsituation der Freien und Hansstadt Hamburg zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2003). 35 WIA, 1.9.13.1.6.1, Description of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW), typescript, 2 fols. (cf. WIA, I.9.8.3 draft version of the text, typescript with handscript annotations by Aby Warburg, 2 fols.), f. 2: “Lesesaal: Bibliographie und Zeitschriften / In den Magazinen: / 1. Kunstgeschichte / 2. Nachleben der Antike in Religion, Wissenschaft und Bildung. / 3. Geschichte (darunter auf breiterer Grundlage Italiens Stadtkultur) und Literaturgeschichte. / 4. Soziologie, Handel, Neuere politische Geschichte, Weltkrieg und Zeitungen / 5. Geschichte des Festwesens und des Theaters; Holländische Kulturgeschichte des XVII Jahrh.” The document has no date but it is ascribable to 1926 as it described the disposition of the Library sections testified in a longitudinal section of the new building annotated by Warburg in July 1926 (WIA, 1.4.8, Hamburg, Heilwigstrasse 116, plans and sections dated May 1925 with notes by Warburg dated July 1927); the text, titled “Für die Minerva 1927,” was possibly a prospectus or press release for an article composed that year and published in 1927 (P. Trommsdorff, “Der Zweite

Niedersächsische

Bibliotekartag,”

Minerva-Zeitschrift.

Nachrichten für die Gelherte Welt 3:6-7 (1927), 145-47). 36 Cf. Mazzucco (as in note 33). 37 A. Warburg, “Italienische Kunst und internationale Astrologie im Palazzo Schifanoja zu Ferrara,” in L’Italia e Parte straniera: atti del X Congresso Internazionale di Storia delPArte in Roma (1912), ed. A. Venturi (Rome, 1922), 179-93; Warburg, “Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten” (as in note 12); cf. English edition, A. Warburg, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age

of Luther,” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, ed. K.W. Forster (Malibu, 1999), 597-697. Originally delivered as a lecture in 1918, the text was published in 1920 after Franz Boll’s interest and thanks to the assistance of Wilhelm Prinz and Fritz Saxl. 38 WIA, 1.9.14.3, Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg: Grundriß der Bücheraufstellung und Bildersammlung, c. 1931-1932; on this document and the related bibliography, cf. Mazzucco, “L’iconoteca Warburg” (as in note 33). 39 WIA 1.13.3.5, The Warburg Institute (as in note 32); cf. Bing, “The Warburg Institute,” and Wind, “The Warburg Institute Classification Scheme” (as in note 33). 40 Bing, “The Warburg Institute” (as in note 33), 5. 41 Wind, “The Warburg Institute Classification Scheme” (as in note 33), 195. 42 Cf. S. Settis, “Introduzone,” Saxl, La fede negli astri (as in note 9); R. Duits, “Reading the Stars of the Renaissance: Fritz Saxl and Astrology,” Journal of Art Historiography 5 (December 2011). 43 F. Saxl, Handschrifen 1927 (as in note 6), and cf. Panofsky and Saxl, “Classical Mythology” (as in note 16). As remarked by Rembrandt Duits (“Reading the Stars of the Renaissance,” as in note 42) Saxl’s theory on iconography of constellations, though “imperfect,” “remains the only succinct and comprehensive outline of the transmission of constellation images from Antiquity to the Renaissance published until” D. Blume, M. Haffner, and W. Metzger, Sternbilder des Mittelalters: Der gemalte Himmel zwischen Wissenschaft und Phantasie (Berlin, 2012). 44 E. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm 1960; rev. ed. Uppsala 1965; New York, 1969); cf. early Panofsky’s paper “Renaissance and Renascences,” The Kenyon Review 2, VI (1944), 201-36. 45 G. Kubier, “Disjunction and Mutational Energy,” Art News 59:10 (February, 1961), 34, 55; G. Kubier, “Renascence and Disjunction in the Art of Mesoamerican Antiquity,” Ornament, Via III (1977), 31-39; rpt. Studies in Ancient American and European Art: The Collected Essays of George Kubler, ed. T.F. Reese (New Haven, 1985).

46 A. Goldschmidt, “Das Nachleben der antiken Formen im Mittelalter,” Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg I, 1921-22 (1923), 40-50. We should keep in mind that Goldschmidt’s essay was first delivered for the Bibliothek Warburg and then published in the volume edited by Saxl; the considerations by Saxl on Isidore and medieval imagery are included in the correspondence between the two scholars regarding the lecture (cf. note 30). 47 In this sense, cf. E. Gombrich (Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, London, 1970), who dates the principle back to Anton Springer and to the introduction of the term Nachleben with specific reference to medieval art in his Bilder aus der Neueren Kunstgeschichte (Bonn, 1867). 48 S. Kracauer, History: The Last Things before the Last (New York, 1965). 49 “Particolari, primi piani, microanalisi: In margine a un libro di Siegfried Kracauer,” Paragone 54, nos. 48-50 (August-December 2003), 20-37; rpt. as a chapter of the book II filo e le tracce: Vero, falso, finto (Milano, 2006); “Minutiae, Close-up, Microanalysis,” English translation S.R. Gilbert, Critical Inquiry 34 (Autumn 2007), 174-89. 50 Cf. V. Breidecker, “‘Ferne Nähe’: Kracauer, Panofsky, und ‘the Warburg Tradition,”’ S. Kracauer and E. Panofsky, Briefwechsel 1941-1966 (Berlin, 1996), 165-76. 51 E. Panofsky, “Perspektive als symbolische Form,” Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, 1925, 258-330; published separately (Leipzig/Berlin, 1927); English translation Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York, 1991). 52 WIA III.15.1.3, Tagebücher der KBW (TB), III, 14/09/1927 (A. Warburg, Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg, ed. K. Michels and C. Schoell-Glass, Gesammelte Schriften - Studienausgabe VII [Berlin, 2001]); WIA GC, Fritz Saxl to Aby Warburg, 04/10/1927, 15/11/1927; cf. WIA Ia 1.7, Annual Report, Fritz Saxl, typescript draft with some handwritten annotations, dated November 15, 1927, 19 fols. 53 WIA III. 108.10, Folder label handwritten by Warburg: “F. Saxl (u. Breitenbach) Atlas zur Gebärdensprach, Herbst 1927.” The folder’s content relates to a different event - that is, the provisional exhibition

on cosmology arranged at the KBW in September 1927 for the project in collaboration with the Deutsches Museum in Munich (cf. WIA III. 100, Kosmologie: Deutsches Museum, 1927). 54 WIA III. 15.2.2, TB, V, 14/08/1928. 55 WIA GC, Fritz Saxl to Aby Warburg, 15/11/1927 (as in note 52): “Was die Photographiensammlung betrifft, [...] hat Breitenbach die systematische Abteilung vollkommen geordnet und katalogisiert.” 56 WIA III.108.il, Diagrams for Mnemosyne, no date. The section includes two different collections of papers, one with handwritten notes by Warburg on twenty-eight small sheets; the other, to which the SaxlBreitenbach atlas could be referred and that can be therefore dated Fall 1927, composed of thirty-eight sheets with handwritten diagrams ascribable to Saxl and Breitenbach, and with further notes by Warburg. 57 WIA la 1.7, Annual Report (as in note 52); WIA, GC, Fritz Saxl to Aby Warburg, 15/11/1927. Cf. K. Mazzucco, “(Photographic) Subject-Matter: Fritz Saxl Indexing Mnemosyne: A Stratigraphy of the Warburg Institute Photographic Collection’s System,” Classifying Content: Photographic Collections and Theories of Thematic Ordering, ed. C. Franceschini and K. Mazzucco, Visual Resources 30:3 (September 2014), 201-21. 58 WIA la 1.7, “Annual Report” (as in note 52), 13: “Der Atlas, wie er wirklich jetzt vorliegt, umfasst meiner Schätzung nach ungefähr 400 < 550 > Bilder, die in drei Gruppen geordnet sind: 1) der Gestaltwandel der antiken Götter als Olympier und Dämonen im Mittelalter und 2) die Restitution ihrer antiken Formen in der Renaissance / 2) Tradition und Rezeption Antiker Pathosformeln im Mittelalter und Renaissance / 3) Formwandel einzelner antiker Gestalten im Bildformen im Mittelalter und Renaissance.” 59 WIA Ia 1.7, “Annual Report” (as in note 52), 15. 60 WIA Ia 1.7, “Annual Report” (as in note 52), 16, 17. 61 WIA Ia 1.7, “Annual Report” (as in note 52), 18. This is not an isolated attempt: after a seminar of the KBW with the young student Ludwig Heydenreich, for which a small display of architectural material had

been exhibited, Saxl took notes about “Pathos-Formeln der Architektur,” WIA III. 15.1.3, TB, III, F. Saxl, 07/07/1927. 62 Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (as in note 19), 70-72. 63 O. Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 2 vols. (Munich, 1918, 1922); Decline of the West, vol. 2 (New York, 1926), 189. 64

A.

Goldschmidt,

“Die

Bedeutung

der

Formenspaltung

in

der

Kunstentwicklung,” Independence, Convergence, and Borrowing in Institutions, Thought, and Art (Cambridge, 1937), 167-77; cf. C. Wood, “The Credulity Problem,” in Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China 1500-1800, ed. P.N. Miller and F. Loise (Ann Arbor, 2012), 149-179. 65 T. Dacosta Kauffmann, Toward a Geography ofArt (Chicago, 1988). 66 Saxl, “Ausdrucksgebärden” (as in note 15). In the draft copy of the lecture, the section with annotations for commenting on the panels is typescript on separated sheets numbered, according to the panels, A, B, C, and so forth, and later integrated in the printed version of the text; cf. WIA, Saxl Papers, 8. Ausdrucksgebärden 1930/32, two draft copies of the text, twenty-two fols. each, further inserts, seventeen photographs of the photographic exhibition. It is interesting to note that further copies of the photographs are included in the section “Gestures” of the Photographic Collection of the Warburg Institute. 67 Cf. the discussion of this subject in Saxl, Mithras (as in note 14) and in the lecture delivered in Reading in 1947: F. Saxl, “Continuity and Variations in the Meaning of Images” (1947), Lectures (as in note 24), vol. 1, 1-12. 68 WIA, Saxl Papers, Ausdrucksgebärden (as in note 66), titles of the panels in the pictures: “Mänade und Satyr / Klage / Conclamatio / Medusa und Teufelsfratze / Die Tragische Maske in der Physiognomik des SchreinsDie Groteske der Antike Komödie in der Physiognomik des Bösen / Tötung und Heilung / Flucht und Triumph / Reigen - Tanz der Salome / Seighafter und Inspirierter Aufblick / Griff nach dem Kopf / Trauer und Meditation / Abwehrgeste des Niedergeschlagenen / Verfolgung und

Fliehen / Schmerzlicher Aufblick.” 69 Panofsky wrote in the first footnote of the essay, “This article is a revised version of a lecture delivered for the first time to the teaching staff and students of the Department of Fine Arts of Princeton University. It resulted, however, from the common endeavor of the two authors, who in their research were assisted by the Hamburg students of art history.” 70 Saxl, “Continuity and Variations” (as in note 67), 1, 2.

8 Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968)Dieter Wuttke

Life and work Academic art history became one of the leading fields of the humanities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially with regard to a scientifically guided understanding of art as art. This was due mainly to the work of scholars such as August Schmarsow, Alois Riegl, Adolph Goldschmidt, Heinrich Wólfflin, Aby M. Warburg, Wilhelm Vóge, Julius von Schlosser,1 and their followers (see the essay on Warburg elsewhere in this volume). Their precedence was because the methodology of art history was merged with that of the other humanities, especially history and philology. By 1912 Heinrich Wólfflin had become the symbolic father-figure of the internal methodology and as such had secured the autonomy of the discipline. Aby M. Warburg served the same purpose in synthesizing methods which directed academic art history toward a new horizon looking into cultural studies. In the twentieth century, academic art history was given an essential boost by the undoubtedly most talented art historian of that first generation of students, Erwin Panofsky. He had been influenced both by Wilhelm Vóge and Adolf Gold-schmidt while keeping a critical distance from the formalistic approaches of Alois Riegl and especially of Heinrich Wólfflin. By late 1915, he had

gradually embraced the methodology and objective concerns of Warburg. When he was forced to emigrate from Germany in 1933/34, Panofsky was considered on both sides of the Atlantic to be one of the most productive instructors and researchers of the period. This appraisal remained uncontested until his death and after. Panofsky constantly sought to promote and develop interand transdisciplinarity, which are still the foci and hallmarks of international research in the world of art history. Motivated by Warburg, he led the way into synthetic art and cultural science which took into consideration the history of science and aimed at bridging the gap between the “Two Cultures” - on one side the humanities and on the other natural science and mathematics.2 From the 1980s onwards, “dense description” has been propagated as the methodology of “new” art and cultural studies.- If Voge and Warburg were the inventors of the newly acclaimed methodology, then Panofsky provided its theoretical underlay. These ideas were then applied in fields other than art history. Panofsky’s influence initially in the United States and then in non-European countries was immense; following World War II, Europe also came under the sway. This effect extended into the 1980s and 1990s, supported all along by the translation of his works into a variety of languages. Now in the twenty-first century, despite certain criticism, his model still remains the standard. Erwin Panofsky died in Princeton on March 14, 1968, shortly before his seventy-sixth birthday.- It is said that the last books he asked for were the Bible and the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales. No grave marks his last resting place where one could linger and commemorate him. His ashes were placed in an urn and buried under a tree he favored on the wooded grounds of the Institute for Advanced Study. The exact location is known only to his immediate family. Is this what the author of Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini (1964) would have wished?- Definitely. If asked, he would have considered the visible monument superfluous since in his eyes the

dignity of man rested on immaterial intellectuality as long as it respected human values and acted accordingly. Panofsky’s retreat from the visual and tactile world following his death corresponded exactly to the activity on which his life as a historian had been focused: envisioning life past in the mind’s eye in order to disclose the future to the humane human being. In this vein the Art Museum of Princeton University published a small commemorative booklet in 1969 entitled Erwin Panofsky in Memoriam. The small collection of essays came from a memorial service his friends held one year after his death.- Even today the thin booklet seems the most appropriate posthumous laudation in memorial to the man. Robert A. Koch contributed an article on Lucas Cranach the Elder’s painting Venus and Cupid, which had been acquired in 1968 by the Princeton Art Museum (registration number yl968-lll) and which Panofsky would not have seen. Thus the painting which Panofsky could not have seen in the flesh serves as a kind of grave good for the art historian who had been known to call out, “Goddam the originals,” which of course he meant ironically. His friends knew him as a bookman par excellence. But, of course, they knew as well that for Panofsky as for any art historian nothing counted as much as the originals, and he hunted them down when- and wherever he could. Not leaving it at just a viewing, he would encourage the application of scientific methods as seen in his efforts concerning the Ghent altarpiece. The theme of Koch’s article served as a postscript to Panofsky’s famous paper “Blind Cupid,” which he had published in his Studies in Iconology in 1939. Cranach’s presentation of perfect beauty and its stylized realization were meant as an homage to the great interpreter of artistic beauty as well as to the man of flesh and blood. The renowned Cranach scholar Jacob Rosenberg joined together elements of style analysis, interpretative research in art history, and connoisseurship in his short critical essay, and approached the work of art in the same way Panofsky had seen as necessary. As important as seeing was listening to Panofsky, not

only to words but also equally to tones. Wolfgang Stechow, one of his oldest friends and highly talented musically, elucidated Panofsky’s intimate relationship to music, especially to that of Mozart. Among Panofsky’s Latin epigrams there is one on Mozart’s death, short as it is skillful: Quare, Mors,juvenem Wolfgangum praeripuisti? Ne secreta mea prodere pergat opus. (Why, death, have you carried off Wolfgang so young? [Death’s answer:] So that his work my secrets no longer reveal.)

These and a number of other aspects were integrated by William S. Heckscher into an overall picture of Panofsky’s life and work in less than twenty printed pages.- His contribution combined the masterful gift of presentation with the closest approach possible to truth through content, a reflection of the life and works of Panofsky himself. Written with the affection of an “honor” student, it mirrors the essay Panofsky dedicated to his own teacher, Wilhelm Voge, in 1958. “Truth and Beauty” is, however, the motto of the Institute for Advanced Study,- in which Panofsky served from 1935 to 1968, a course of thirty-three years. Today, Panofsky critics say that there is no such thing as “disguised symbolism.” Jan Bialostocki, the distinguished Polish art historian, considered its discovery in Dutch art as one of Panofsky’s lasting insights.2 No one would have reacted more calmly to the criticism than the perceiver himself. All that is valid for Panofsky’s scientific studies is valid for this discourse; he raised the level of discussion to a height previously unknown. Hardly any of these critics would be prepared to accept this or even to try to reconstruct the research context to which Panofsky had reacted. The historian Joachim Fest observed, “Was sich kritische Geschichte nennt, offenbart häufig weniger Kraft zur Unterscheidung, als zur Verdammung, und kein Respekt vor dem Stummsein der Toten macht den Anklägern die Schuldsprüche

schwer.” (That which is called critical history often discloses not so much the power to discern than the wish to condemn, and the accusers having no respect for the silence of the dead are ready with their verdict.)— A Hanoverian by birth, by blood a Prussian-Berlin Jew with a heart for Hamburg who was driven to the paradise of Princeton: this is how one could characterize him in modification of Aby M. Warburg’s own biographical formula.— Erwin Panofsky was born on March 30, 1892, in Hannover, the son of well-to-do parents. In his forties, Panofsky’s father decided to become a man of leisure. The family moved to Berlin and the son was enrolled in the distinguished Joachimsthalsches Gymnasium, which educated and formed him in such a way that ensured his lifelong gratitude. One day, the school principal discovered that the Primus omnium was reading the magazine Simplizissimus; he threatened to demote the pupil one step down the ladder if he continued, to which Erwin replied that he should go ahead and demote him. Panofsky began to study law at Freiburg im Breisgau in the summer of 1910. However, right after the first semester, he unofficially began to study art history, and after the second semester he officially majored in it with minors in archaeology, history, and philosophy. Here, it was the attraction of the subtle and sensitive as well as artistically talented and methodically sound Wilhelm Voge which set him onto the path of professional art history. This is where Panofsky learned that it was more important to have methods than to write about them. It was also here where he learned what methodology does not teach: methods cannot be learned from methods but rather from their practical application. Although he published the methodological essay on the unity of content and form, Meaning in the Visual Arts, in the Magazine of Art in 1951, and in 1955 the paperback of the same name with the famous methodological introduction of “Iconography and Iconology,” his favorite saying was “the discussion of methods spoils their application.” It was typical of

him that from his base in the United States he did not recommend any introduction to methodology to other art experts but instead referred only to the last book of his former teacher, Wilhelm Vöge, Jörg Syrlin der Ältere und seine Bildwerke (Jörg Syrlin the Elder and His Work) (1950). This, he claimed, was perhaps the closest to the ideal of a “total history of art.”— Only in one instance did the cleverly modest man, who otherwise ironically observed that he had written only “little books,” dare to call one of his own works an “opus magnum.” It was no coincidence that, when he introduced the concept of disguised symbolism in Early Netherlandish Painting (1953) into art historical discourse, he dedicated it to Wilhelm Vöge. This major work was developed out of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures Panofsky had given at Harvard, which was according to one of his letters an honor nearly equivalent to the Nobel Prize. His dissertation, Dürers Kunsttheorie, vornehmlich in ihrem Verhältnis zur Kunsttheorie der Italiener (Dürer’s Theory of Art, Especially in Relation to the Theory of Art of Italian Artists), was the answer to a question in a contest he won in 1913, the prize awarded by the Grimm Foundation of the University of Berlin. He received his PhD in 1914 under Vöge in Freiburg, and the dissertation was published in 1915. The book, which for a doctoral thesis at that time was uncommonly long, reveals unique talent. The factual and stylistic mastery of a topic so challenging in its interdisciplinary approach is phenomenal, and even today the work has not been superseded. What came to light then continued to mark a life of research of more than forty years, successful in the sense of its comprehensiveness and profundity: the simultaneous mastery of mathematical, philosophical, aesthetic, art historical, historical, and philological knowledge and methods, nothing less than a seemingly effortless transdisciplinarity. It discloses a rare ability to present highly complicated phenomena in ordered clarity, breathtaking speed in output, and a highly factual as well as linguistic certitude. In his thesis, however, a

long-term risk became evident: occasionally his urge to communicate his findings kept him from continuing the search for further sources and led to premature hypotheses. Since, however, Panofsky not only taught but also practiced scientific integrity, he himself would open the way for criticism and accept and integrate it in further publications. By the winter of 1914-1915 Panofsky was back in Berlin. To complete his training, he sought out the famous medievalist Adolph Goldschmidt. Apparently, though, Panofsky had quite a bit to offer Goldschmidt, who in his typically dry manner remarked, “Wenn Erwin ein Bild sieht, dann fällt ihm immer etwas ein.” (When Erwin sees a picture, something always occurs to him about it.) A fellow student, Edmund Schilling, remarked that Panofsky replied: “Sie sind das Trüffelschwein, das die Trüffeln sucht. Ich bin der Koch, der damit die guten Gerichte bereitet.” (You are the truffle pig searching for truffles, and I am the cook using them in tasty dishes.) This is a sign of how the Goldschmidt circle moderated scientific seriousness with humor and irony. This typical Berlin wit remained Panofsky’s life elixir. In Goldschmidt’s seminar he met Dora Mosse, eight years his senior, whom he married in 1916. At the end of 1915, Goldschmidt arranged Panofsky’s first visit to the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg. Here, Warburg himself introduced his research library as an Institut für Ausdruckskunde (Institute for the Study of Artistic Expression) to the students from Berlin, among whom was Hans Kauffmann, the future chair of art history in Berlin. It was here that Panofsky stepped into the magic circle of the man who must be considered the inventor of those comprehensive visual studies, now called Bildwissenschaft, and who would become after Vbge and Goldschmidt his third major influence.— From the time of his university studies he had traveled extensively in Germany and Europe to study original works of art. Even his honeymoon through Franconia with a week’s stay in

Bamberg in the summer of 1916 served as an excursion in art history. During his civilian service in 1918 he started to look for a venue where he could undertake his habilitation. He nearly went to Heidelberg or Tübingen but instead responded to an offer made by Gustav Pauli, the director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, on December 31, 1919, to come to Hamburg and to join the faculty of the newly founded university. By the summer of 1920, his habilitation on Michelangelo was finished. He had submitted a manuscript with the title Die Gestaltungsprincipien Michelangelos, besonders in ihrem Verhältnis zu denen Raffaels (The Formal Principles in Michelangelo’s Art, Especially in Relation to Those of Raphael), which was never published. A sensation occurred in June 2012, when a safe in the basement of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich which had been unopened for years revealed a revised, 334-page version of this work.— Gustav Pauli considered Panofsky to be the most talented of the younger generation of German art historians and the only one qualified for the soon to be created chair of art history at the University of Hamburg. Since the position was only to be filled in January 1926, Panofsky had to fall back on private financial means, the occasional sale of inherited antiques, and the modest salary of a wissenschaftlicher Hilfsarbeiter (auxiliary assistant) to bridge the unpaid gap. Despite his poor financial situation and as soon as postwar conditions allowed, he began foreign travelling, looking up colleagues and dealers, viewing works of art, and researching sources. In 1924 he wrote to his wife from Amsterdam: “Es ist herrlich, für 6 Wochen Europäer zu sein” (It is wonderful to be a European for six weeks); in Paris, 1925, he exclaimed, “Es ist tatsächlich die Hauptstadt Europas” (This really is the capital of Europe). By 1920 the couple with their two sons, Hans and Wolfgang Hans became a meteorologist, Wolfgang a physicist and both were to be just as successful as their father - moved from Berlin to Hamburg, the city Panofsky had encountered for the first time in

1911 (or possibly some years earlier). He put down roots quickly, and whenever he recalled the thirteen years he spent there, he considered them to be the best and most productive of his life. No other town remained so close to his heart nor aroused more longing and nostalgia. It was the 1920s which he considered to be the most modern years of the century and appreciated the most. The fact that he never returned to Hamburg underlined his feelings for the irretrievable city he had to leave. He brought great enthusiasm to the new position, finding no work too menial or any task too bothersome as he established the art history department. As a teacher he was ingenious and extraordinarily charismatic. In next to no time the art history department drew the highly gifted from all over Germany to Hamburg (Fig. 8.1). When the term Hamburger Schule came into existence, this honorary title was also due to a large extent to the scientific energy emanating from the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg.

Figure &1 Panofsky and his students from Hamburg University on an excursion to Westphalia from July 16 through July 20, 1932. Panofsky is

sitting on the right side with his wife Dora in a white blouse behind him. For the identification of the other figures see Korrespondenz, vol. I (as in note 1), 366 (Fig. 34), and additions in Wuttke, Kumulationen (as in note 1), 33. Photo courtesy of Archive Wuttke.

Decisive for Panofsky’s further development as a researcher was the fact that he was so open to Warburg’s train of thought and found in his library the best instrument imaginable for research in art history. In Hamburg he became so involved in the library that he must have not only been considered the ideal user but also appeared to outsiders as a second Warburg and the person who was able to bring to light the immense power of the library as an instrument of research. Naturally a person like this, striving to integrate and open to philosophical stimulation, would focus on the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, who was in contact with the Warburg circle. Due to the stimulating influence of this circle Panofsky added typology to his studies and the new approach to a work of art called “iconography”; this extended even further his studies which had used the concept of style, historical art theory, and aesthetics as their methodology. In his monograph Imago Pietatis: Ein Beitrag zur Typengeschichte des Schmerzensmanns und der Maria Mediatrix (1927) he not only illustrated the power of typology but also was the first to elucidate its theoretical structure. With his essay on the theory of iconography, Zur Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst (1932), he examined the close integration of art and culture using a scientific basis which is still, despite critical remarks, unsurpassed in terms of methodology. This article was so fundamental and had such far-reaching consequences that its importance for the interpretation of visual art can be compared only with Heinrich Wolfflin’s Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915). If today it is self-evident in philology and comparative cultural sciences that a picture accompanying a text must be integrated into the interpretation, that historians struggle for a methodological

foundation when studying historical images, that from their midst a call goes out for image criticism which corresponds to textual criticism, while on the other hand art historians regard the interpretation of a text accompanying an image as self-evidently relevant, then all this must, to a great degree, be credited to Panofsky. Just like Warburg, he belongs to those prophets whose shoulders posterity may stand upon to expand its vision. The evolutionary thrust he provided to the disciplines of the humanities which interpret art is comparable for example to the discovery of the Indo-European family tree of languages and its significance for linguistics. In 1933 the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg moved to London. Even before his death, Warburg had considered transferring the library to Italy and Rome, and when the antiJewish terror of the Nazis commenced, the decision to leave became imperative. Panofsky, who since 1931 in his role as the library’s ambassador had already taught twice at New York University as a visiting professor and whose lectures in English on German art were highly respected, fortunately received a further invitation for 1934/35, so that the whole family risked the move to Princeton. In Hamburg, the expulsion of the teachers and the loss of the library brought about the demise of teaching and studying art history. In New York, however, Panofsky received an offer from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, an institution he remained loyal to for the rest of his life, even though others, including Harvard, attempted to hire him. There, the Einstein of art history became a colleague as well as a friend of the great physicist Einstein. His friendship with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli was even closer. When Pauli was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945, Panofsky was chosen to deliver the institute’s congratulatory speech in which his humanistic command of wit and language and his ability to combine the natural sciences and the humanities in one dialogue honored not only the recipient but also Panofsky himself. In the field of art history, cultural relations between America

and Germany had already started before World War I with among others the founding of the Germanic Museum at Harvard. In the second half of the 1920s the bonds were strengthened. Prior to Panofsky, Adolph Gold-schmidt and Gustav Pauli were invited to give lectures and speeches at different universities and museums; following them came Arthur Haseloff. The College of Fine Arts at New York University had started art history summer courses for American students in Berlin and Munich. The Warburg Library responded positively to the American attention it had attracted since 1929 by inviting the art historian Paul J. Sachs of Harvard and Abraham Flexner, the well-known educational reformer, cultural politician, and later founder of the Institute for Advanced Study, for an informational trip to Germany. Since art history’s “ground work” had already been done and Panofsky’s reputation was well known in the United States, it surprised no one when he received three offers to teach there following his departure from Hamburg: from Harvard, New York, and Chicago. Walter W. S. Cook and Richard Offner, both from New York, Paul J. Sachs of Harvard, and Charles Rufus Morey of Princeton were his tireless supporters. Just as subtly effective was the clandestine diplomat Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the young director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and especially his wife, Margaret Scolari Barr. She had studied under Panofsky in New York in the winter of 1931/32, polishing and honing his spoken and written English to the level his language skills demanded. Without her he could hardly have balanced the job offers so diplomatically until Morey came through with an invitation to the Institute for Advanced Study in the spring of 1935, which he accepted. All the American offers in 1934/35, however, would not have tempted him had there been a comparable opportunity in Great Britain which would have enabled him to use the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, now called the Warburg Institute. It was only when he gave up all hope of being able to work in Britain that Panofsky severed the emotional ties to Europe and thus freed himself for the New World. A wound

remained, however, which opened whenever he dealt with the Warburg Institute. After he was naturalized in 1940 and Europe was sinking into ruins he called the new American phase of life his “expulsion into paradise.” His appointment to the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1935 confirmed his position as the leading art historian of the time. He would not have been Panofsky had he not more than fulfilled all the hopes invested in him and the demands made upon him. Collegiality and cooperation in Princeton distinguished him just as they had in Hamburg. New friendships for example, with the graphics expert William M. Ivins, the author Booth Tarkington, and the film historian and theorist Siegfried Kracauer - were formed, new students such as Millard Meiss arrived on the scene, old friends and former colleagues and students - Walter Friedländer, Alexander Dorner, Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Hanns Swarzenski, William S. Heckscher were helped in any way possible. In the shortest period of time imaginable the language genius had conquered English and went on to give his grateful listeners new visual insights on the treasures of the fine arts. The fact that his audience was aware of his enormous erudition and admired him for his ability to decipher the content of difficult images, celebrating him as an iconographer, pleased him but also effected ironical understatement. He was fond of iconography but he always saw content and form as a unity. This is more than evident in the aforementioned Imago Pietatis (1927) and Meaning in the Visual Arts (1951), as well as in his great works, Albrecht Dürer (1943), the first relevant presentation of Dürer in English, and his Early Netherlandish Painting of 1953. Panofsky was seen by both his proponents and adversaries to be the leading art historian of the time - a claim he never once himself made but which aroused resistance all the same. One of Panofsky’s most powerful adversaries in the United States was Francis Henry Taylor, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who labeled him a printed-word scholar,

insensitive to the values of art. Following the publication of his Studies in Iconology (1939), the director was driven to remark that it was hardly a wonder when students in Germany threw themselves in despair into the arms of the National Socialists when confronted with this kind of inscrutable and useless study. Even earlier, the legendary art connoisseur Bernard Berenson, in a letter to Margaret Barr, of all people, made Panofsky the Hitler of academic art history and Charles Rufus Morey his Hindenburg. Furthermore, it must be stated that Panofsky was always very much against the isolated application of individual methods. For example, he did not approve of the plan to start a special journal for iconology, even though his favorite student, Heckscher, supported it. As in his professional field, he did not keep his political outlook, which was that of a liberal, silent, supporting Roosevelt, declining a lecture tour to California if it meant swearing the oath of loyalty, publicly opposing McCarthy, and, as an opponent of nuclear defense, calling all those involved in the production of the neutron bomb “no better than Eichmann: efficient and obedient experts of annihilation.”— In his lecture first given in Princeton in 1953, which was subsequently printed as In the Defense of the Ivory Tower, he defines the political responsibility of the scholar. It should be stressed that as an afterthought he produced the short essay On Movies (1936), which gave film theory a powerful, unforeseeable impulse. The occasion was the founding of the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is today one of Panofsky’s most cited and most studied works. Unfortunately, we know nothing of the cinema scripts which he wrote as a young student and scholar. In any case, he and his wife Dora always enjoyed going to the movies.

Figure &2 Panofsky in his study at the Institute for Advanced Study, spring 1966. Panofsky’s gesture is inspired by the portrait of Abbot Suger in the abbey church of St. Denis, Paris. Photo courtesy of Archive Wuttke.

Not counting those essays published on the topic of the Middles Ages in his Deutschsprachige Aufsätze,— Panofsky made a mark for himself as a medievalist when he wrote Die deutsche Plastik des elften bis dreizehnten Jahrhunderts (The German Art of Sculpture in the Eleventh through the Thirteenth Centuries, 1924),

a monograph in which stylistic analysis is the prevailing method used. One of his first lectures in Morey’s Princeton of 1931/32 was Classical Mythology in Medieval Art (printed 1933/34). This was his introduction of Warburg’s methods to American art historians in which he elucidated the “principle of disjunction,” discovered by him and propagated as a kind of scientific law. He returned to the Middle Ages during World War II when he wrote Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St. Denis and Its Art Treasures, completed in 1944 and published in 1946. His fondness for Suger increased to the extent that Panofsky saw him as his alter ego (Fig. 8.2) and confessed in his letters written in Latin that his model was no longer Cicero but, rather, his idol, Suger. The 1951 publication of Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism has been widely criticized but lauded by paleographer Robert Marichal, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss— and became the most printed work by Panofsky in the United States. Among his essential medieval writings were the already cited Early Netherlandish Painting and Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (1960), dealing with medieval renascences. Only recently has one domain of Panofsky’s restless activity been made accessible to public assessment, that of his correspondence. The publication of the extensive five-volume selection of his letters has filled the former void.— Panofsky’s wife Dora, of the Berlin Mosse family, supported his scientific work after the birth of their sons, Hans (1917) and Wolfgang (1919). It was only between 1943 and 1958 that she was able to undertake her own research and publish scientific papers. Their interests merged when they coauthored a volume on the history and influence of the motif of Pandora’s box in the monograph Pandora’s Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol (London, 1956). It is dedicated to the memory of Gustav Pauli, who, as noted, steered the Panofskys to Hamburg decades earlier. Dora’s unique, slightly masculine type of charm and intellectuality attracted a number of susceptible people. Colin

Eisler and William S. Heckscher have confirmed this, and her correspondence with the Hamburg artist Eduard Bargheer proves that although she was frail, she could be quite fervent.— Her life, unfortunately, was restricted from the mid-1940s due to ill health, a condition that reinforced the very close relationship she had with her husband. Dora died in October 1965. In June 1966 Panofsky married his second wife, the art historian Gerda Soergel. After the destruction caused by World War II, efforts were made to renew severed links. The Panofskys worried most about their former housekeeper, Bertel Ziegenhagen, who had devotedly cared for their sons, Hans and Wolfgang, but who had remained in Germany, his beloved and revered teacher, Wilhelm Voge, and Dora’s sister, Martha Mosse, who had escaped from the concentration camp of Theresienstadt. Through people affiliated with the occupation forces, Panofsky successfully searched for the family friend Trux Jorgensen and his former student, the archaeologist Peter Heinrich von Blanckenhagen. He generously provided them with care packages, and in the cases of Bertel and Martha with financial support. Contact from Germany and Europe was to be very sparse for several years. Full honors must go to the Freie Hansestadt Hamburg and its university as they endeavored to recall their former professor as early as April 1946, although not without pressure from the British occupation forces. The University of Leipzig also approached him in 1947 through Panofsky’s old friend, the archaeologist Bernhard Schweitzer. The Greek scholar Bruno Snell, a former neighbor on Alte Rabenstrasse 34 in Hamburg who not only had survived the Nazi dictatorship but also was able to keep the regime at a distance, also contacted the Panofskys in 1946 and was warmly thanked. Panofsky’s not entirely guiltless old friend Hermann Giesau had strived to renew his old friendship with the family from 1947 onwards, and finally succeeded. While exchange with the Warburg Institute and with researchers in Britain had never been interrupted, a more lively

intercourse with the rest of Europe and Germany developed but only at the end of the 1940s. Doctoral candidates began to consult Panofsky. In 1949, the Swedish art historian Carl Nordenfalk and the German Romanist Ernst Robert Curtius became members of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The International Art Historians’ Congress in Amsterdam may well have served as a vehicle for normalizing relations in 1952. There, Panofsky once again met his acquaintance Hans Kauffmann, who had been present at his engagement party, and for the first time he met Gert von der Osten, then the director of the Landesmuseum in Hannover. Panofsky had been invited to the meeting by Jan Gerrit van Gelder and availed of the opportunity to go on to Sweden, where he gave the Gottesman Lectures in Gripsholm Castle by invitation of the University of Uppsala. The first part of the series - and unfortunately only this - appeared in 1960 under the title Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art. At this time, a younger, international group of art historians had recognized the exemplary and stimulating potential in Panofsky’s work. It helped that in 1955 Meaning in the Visual Arts had been published in paperback, which Panofsky thus labeled his “drugstore book.” In this inexpensive form it became an academic best seller. The paperback edition of Studies in Iconology, which had initially appeared in hardback in 1939, followed in 1962. Gradually, the interruption caused by the Nazi regime and World War II to the flow of ideas was ending, and global recognition of Panofsky ensued. For the first time, German art historians who had not emigrated were invited to become members of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton: Ernst Holzinger (1950/51), Gert von der Osten (1957/58), Willibald Sauerlânder (1961/62), and Egon Verheyen (1962/63). Leopold Ettlinger and Otto Pâcht, émigrés until then working in London, were called to the Institute in 1956/57. Otto Pâcht was later appointed to the chair of art history at his alma mater, the university of his hometown - Vienna. Panofsky congratulated him with the following lovely worded and

self-revelatory note: “It is no secret that I am a split personality, half Warburgian and half Viennese, and so I am doubly glad to see that chair filled by a scholar who is, more than anyone else, within the Apostolic succession.” The first translations of Panofsky’s works into a non-English language - namely, Italian - appeared in 1951 and 1961/62, and from 1964 on, the edition of Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, which Hariolf Oberer and Egon Verheyen had obtained, advanced the Panofsky “renaissance” in Germany. As a great favor to German art history and due to the persuasive efforts of Kurt Bauch, professor of art history at the University of Freiburg, Panofsky conceded to portray his former teacher Wilhelm Vöge in the introduction of the 1958 edition of Vöge’s collected works in German. However, the dam of reservations toward the country that he never wanted to see again only started to crumble in 1966 when he saw it as his duty to pay his respects to the parents of his second wife, Gerda, in Cologne. As soon as Panofsky had shown a willingness to travel to Germany, initiated by Kurt Bauch, his German friends acted: Herbert von Einem in Bonn, Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich in Munich, and Hans Kauffmann in Berlin extended invitations to him. Gert von der Osten, the general director of the Cologne museums, as well as Willibald Sauerländer in Freiburg also fell into line, so that in 1967 Panofsky visited Cologne, Bonn, Freiburg, and Munich. The honors accorded him culminated in Panofsky’s admission to the Order Pour le mérite, awarded in the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. Between 1936 in Utrecht and 1967 in Bonn Panofsky received many awards and honorary doctorates, and various academies and societies appointed him as a member. As much as this promoted his renown, it did not noticeably affect his research. In answering the many congratulatory letters, he rarely replied other than ironically: the first award one would receive is by chance; all following would result from that first one. There are, however,

occasionally signs of unclouded joy. In 1957, on the occasion of being awarded an honorary doctorate from Harvard, he was dressed in a custom-made copy of his former Hamburg academic gown (Fig. 8.3). In 1962 he retired as professor emeritus. In the same year, the same university he had started to teach in from 1931 onwards, New York University, conferred an honorary doctorate on him and praised him as “one of the greatest minds of our time” and as “perhaps the greatest living figure in the whole field of art history.” The Institute of Fine Arts persuaded him to teach there, but in the middle of December 1967, a heart attack ended his professional career. Two weeks before his seventy-sixth birthday, on March 14, 1968, he passed away. Panofsky’s nature was a composite of sharp intelligence, sparkling humor, and an abiding love of his fellow man. In kindness, humility, gratitude, patience, helpfulness, and loyalty he was just as unsurpassed as in his inconspicuous, intellectual, artistic, and linguistic abilities, which were standard setting. One may, for fear of being misunderstood, never shy away from calling him a humanist in the full sense of the word as Panofsky would have resented it. He knew no snobbishness or class conceit and was prepared to converse with anyone except barbarians. Cicero and Erasmus, Dante and Shakespeare, Jean Paul and Fontane, Abbot Suger and Alberti, Diirer and Tizian, Leonardo and Galilei, Mozart and Bach would have enjoyed the company of this vir bonus dicendi, videndi audiendique peritus just as much as Klein Erna or the “inventor” of the limerick.

Figure 8.3 Panofsky in his Hamburg academic gown at Harvard, 1957, when he was awarded an honorary doctorate. Photo courtesy of Archive Wuttke.

In 1932, after Ernst Cassirer had contributed a number of lectures and articles on the two hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s birthday, his friend Erwin Panofsky is said to have sent him a piece of kitschy Goethe soap accompanied by the following verse: Deines Geistes reine Reife Tat mir arg beschmutzten wohl. Nimm’ drum diese Goethe-Seife,

Teils als Form, teils als Symbol. (Purest ripeness of your spirit Soothed my soiled torso full Take, therefore, this Goethe soap, partly form and partly symbol.)

A number of his Latin epigrams exemplify his poetic gifts, such as the one already cited on the death of Mozart. A further memorable example is a deep, philosophical poem which questions the sense of the humanists’ research. Panofsky dedicated it to his friends Herbert and Lotte von Einem, accompanying an offprint.— Quid iuvat in nugas talem conferre laborem? Barbarus ad portas; ludere conveniat? Talia quaerere non mortalibus, optime, fas est: Quae Deus imposuit, solvere pensa decet. Psittacus atque elephas coeli sub lumine vivunt Extant heroes grammaticique simul. Quidquidfata volent, animus tamen usque manebit Aequus - et inter nos inviolata fides. (What use to struggle with uselessness? // The barbarian is right at the door; is child’s play now fitting? // To ask this, my friend, is not mortals’ right: // Fulfilling God-sent tasks is our work. // The parrot and the elephant live under heaven’s light, // heroes and scholars fare like-wise. // Whatever fate brings, equanimity should remain // and loyalty among us abide.)

Occasionally one may hear art historians of both sexes stating that Panofsky is “out” and only Warburg is “in.” This verdict is applied to a person who was also quite well thought of among women in the field. Following the premature death of Fritz Saxl, the director of London’s Warburg Institute, Panofsky was offered his vacant post by Gertrud Bing, Warburg’s assistant in Hamburg and later assistant director in London. She knew of no one more qualified for the position, and when he declined, she outspokenly declared

that now only the second-best would fill the position. As far as I can tell, Panofsky’s influence resulted from his power to convince and not to persuade. Although he was always ready to give lectures and to participate in discussions, not only to clearly express his liberal-humanist opinions but also to voice protest in matters of politics and to explain and publish the results of his research, he never undertook to promote himself. As a researcher and politician dealing with questions of learning and education he would never have acted aggressively as a partisan of his own concerns. From my own experience I can state that he considered himself neither sacrosanct nor beyond criticism. That is why at this point I fail to understand the continuing irrational aggression directed toward him since his death. Whether the increasing signs of a trans-Atlantic climate change in relation to the present bias against him are pointing to an about-face and a return to an objectively and historically more prudent assessment of his work remains to be seen. Perhaps the recently published Korrespondenz, which illustrates the diversity in his life and works, can promote the turn.—

Description and interpretation of works of art A thorough evaluation would overextend this article. However, over and above the points already mentioned in the preceding section, the following comments will attempt to deal with basic and differentiating aspects of the topic. If we want to understand Panofsky, we must recognize that in his definitions of iconography, iconology, and typology his focus is not on history but rather on theory.— The applications of his theories are to be found in his papers - as opposed to his still unpublished lectures— - which are generally free of didactic

references to his theoretical statements and unconcerned with adhering strictly to his own theoretical specifications. He neither is concerned with the history of typology, iconography, and iconology nor gives any information, barring a few short references, to the impulses he might have received from others. For typology we have his reference to archaeology but no specific evidence as to the sources he might have used. In his approach to iconography and iconology we may assume that his teachers, Voge and Gold-schmidt, stressed the practical before the theoretical.— He hardly noticed the efforts made to establish an Internationale Gesellschaft für Ikonographische Studien between 1902 and 1909. Gold-schmidt and Warburg were engaged in the process but probably did not inform their students. The discussions taking place at the Internationale Gesellschaft für Ikonographische Studien, in which the term “iconology” had already been proposed as the new methodological approach, were and still are of historical and theoretical interest today.— The established connection to Warburg and his Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek in all probability provided the greatest impulse for the birth of Panofsky’s own theory, which then filled in the theoretical gap in academic art history.— According to his own testimony, nothing exerted greater influence on his research. Soon after he had emigrated to the United States in 1934, the Index of Christian Art in Princeton presumably served as another important source.—

Typology The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung published a series of articles on Die Zukunftsaufgaben der deutschen Wissenschaft in 1927. Panofsky contributed an article on the Probleme der Kunstgeschichte. Instead of what the title claims, he concentrated on one problem he found especially urgent - to overcome the disjunction of aesthetics and interpreting content by bringing

about the conjunction of form and content when viewing a work of art. He saw the answer in typology and proposed treating a specific topic holistically so that form and content are perceived as one entity. The same year he delivered the most convincing example using the already mentioned Imago Pietatis: Ein Beitrag zur Typengeschichte des Schmerzensmanns und der Maria Mediatrix.— His interpretation shows the following theoretical findings: (1) the term “type” refers to the “complex unity of form and content” (komplexe Einheit von Inhalt und Form). (2) He views art objects neither by purely analyzing the form nor by purely analyzing the content iconographically but aims at artistic unities in a historical context “in which a certain content combines with a certain form to form a descriptive entity” (“in denen sich ein bestimmter Inhalt mit einer bestimmten Form zu einer anschaulichen Einheit verbindet”). Edgar Breitenbach’s book Speculum humanae Salvationist Eine typengeschichtliche Untersuchung (1930), which developed out of his 1927 dissertation in Hamburg, adopted, contrary to expectations, none of the results from Panofsky’s groundbreaking study. It was not even cited. Breitenbach used the term bildtypengeschichtliche Methode without defining it.— This corresponds to Panofsky’s earlier use. Together with Fritz Saxl in 1923 he had written a monograph which became extremely well known and was called Dürers Melencholia I’: Eine quellen- und typengeschichtliche Untersuchung, in which he did not even mention the term typengeschichtlich. He did write on a “series of types” in the introduction to the already mentioned book Die deutsche Plastik des elften bis dreizehnten Jahrhunderts. With the book Hercules am Scheidewege und andere antike Bildstoffe in der neueren Kunst (Hercules at the Crossroads and Other Antique Subject Matter in Art, 1930), iconography was given preference over the history of types. In the meantime, iconography had developed into a discrete method which could now be a new focal point. Only once did he later emphasize the history of type and

that was in the title of ‘Melencholia’ (’s) second edition. Panofsky had mainly enlarged, revised, and recast the manuscript for this second edition. His wish was to retain “quellen- und typengeschichtlich” in the subtitle so that if the book had been published in German, the title would have read: Melancholia: Eine quellen- und typengeschichtliche Untersuchung zur astrologischen Temperamentenlehre.—

Iconography and iconology Hercules am Scheidewege of 1930 was the work on which Panofsky’s reputation and renown as an iconographer are based, and “monographic” (not iconography!) is the key word which first meets the reader’s eye in the preface.— His intention was, he informs the reader, to “explain a number of art works iconographically” (“eine Anzahl von Kunstwerken ikonographisch zu erklären”). That these works were to represent “types of images,” and new ones at that, is a point the reader realizes only at second glance. One looks as much in vain to return to the definition of “type” as in the Imago Pietatis book as for a clear indication that “type” is defined by the aesthetic unity of form and content. He follows the premise of the Imago Pietatis treatise to deal holistically with “narrowly defined” (“eng begrenzte”) issues, all the while promoting an iconographic explanation at the expense of viewing form. He correctly declares that “a successful exegesis of content does not only come closest to historical understanding but also enriches and clarifies its aesthetics” (“dass eine gelungene Inhaltsexegese nicht nur dem historischen Verständnis zugute kommt, sondern auch dessen ästhetisches Erlebnis [...] bereichert und klärt”). He elucidates why the most formalistic art history has no choice but “to a great extent” undertake “content exegesis” and even take it for granted. He acknowledges the limitation of that deliberate step, one

which was the basis of his success, in a letter which he sent to his former teacher Vöge on January 6, 1931: “From the beginning onwards” he had “inwardly given up trying to do justice to art and found another small corner of the great field of art history to work in, a corner where the meeting of word and image traditions can be studied by way of simultaneously applying type-historical and philological methods so that ‘iconological’ insight can be won” (er habe “auf die Versuche, der Kunst [...] innerlich gerecht zu werden [...], von Anfang an verzichtet [...], und eine andere, kleine Ecke des großen kunsthistorischen Arbeitsfeldes gefunden [...], die Ecke, wo das Zusammentreffen von Worttradition und Bildüberlieferung untersucht und durch die gleichzeitige Anwendung typengeschichtlicher und philologischer Methoden eine bestimmte Form ‘ikonologischer’ Erkenntnisse gewonnen werden kann”).— The appearance of the Hercules book and the probable intercession of the art historian Arthur Haseloff^ of Kiel led to an invitation which was for Panofsky the most portentous. He had been approached to give a lecture on May 20, 1931, at the Kant Society of Kiel which was published one year later under the title Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst.— In combination with the English versions of 1939 and 1955 it made Panofsky the leading theoretician of iconography and iconology.— As early as late fall of 1931, he had the opportunity in New York to elucidate his theories using examples. His colleague Albert M. Friend concluded enthusiastically, “That’s iconography!”— As a farewell gesture, at the end of 1933 he held a private series of lectures in Hamburg on the same topic.— This type of didactic engagement continued in America with such themes as “What Is Iconology?” or in the jocular variation of “Traffic Accidents in the Relation between Texts and Pictures.”— Although Panofsky’s three-stage model of iconographic and iconological interpretation has belonged to the general knowledge of art historians for generations, a brief explanation here based on

the last and final version of 1955 and stressing particular aspects is in order. According to him, when describing and interpreting works of art, three areas must be taken into consideration: the first is the “primary or natural subject matter.” This involves recognizing objects, actions, and expressive gestures which the beholder spontaneously identifies. Since, however, these will be depicted differently over time, the interpreter must take recourse to his or her knowledge of form or style history to avoid misconstruction. The second level deals with the “secondary or conventional subject matter.” The interpreter has the task of explaining the image’s content. For this a knowledge of literary sources is a prerequisite. To avoid coming to false conclusions when linking certain visual content to certain sources, a knowledge of the history of types comes into play as a corrective, which means knowing the pictorial forms certain images have taken over time. This is the area of iconographic analysis. The third level relates to “intrinsic meaning or content” and presents the viewer with the most challenging task. The viewer has to determine both the conscious and perhaps the unconscious intentions that the artist had when creating the work. In order to reach dependable or at least evident conclusions, the interpreter will need an all-encompassing knowledge of the humanities and the sciences. This is the area of iconology. Iconology depends on synthesis, as opposed to analytic iconography. There are two noteworthy aspects to Panofsky’s theory of art interpretation: the first is that design, style, and history of type are, so to speak, de-aestheticized. They become auxiliaries serving iconography. Panofsky apparently consciously declined to develop theories which merged art interpretation and art aesthetics. He always proposed the unity of form and content, stressing that iconography and iconology formed the basis of an adequate understanding of form. Whoever wants to see how he mastered this challenge must study his practical application - that is, the

holistic approach in his great monographs Albrecht Dürer (in two volumes, 1943, as single-volume edition in 1955) and Early Netherlandish Painting (1953), or in the extensive introduction to his last book, Problems in Titian: Mostly Iconographic (1969). The second issue is the term “iconology,” which denotes the third level of interpretation. He did not apply it either in 1932 or in 1939 in spite of the title Studies in Iconology, but included it only in the amended 1955 paperback version, Meaning in the Visual Arts.— Only twelve years later he surprised the art world when the French translation of Studies in Iconology appeared, and he informed his readers in the introduction that if his work had been published at that time, he would have exchanged the title word “Iconology” for “Iconography.” He argued that the term “iconology” had, on the one hand, caused quite a bit of confusion and, on the other, “iconography” had taken on such significance through its use by art historians that it now encompassed the whole interpretative spectrum.— We may take this confession as Panofsky’s expression of skepticism about methodology evident in his earlier cited dictum - “The discussion of methods spoils their application.”— Asked what differentiated iconology from iconography, he had been wittily replying for quite a while, “Optimists will say Iconology is to Iconography as Geology is to Geography, pessimists, that it is as Astrology to Astrography.”— It has not been possible in this short essay to depict the overwhelming impact of Panofsky’s methodology nor the responses it has evoked.— For Günter Bandmann— and Jan Bialostocki,— for instance, a revelation occurred.— Among the critics, no one has found a model to replace Panofsky’s, with one exception - Roelof van Straten. He has proposed applying the term “iconology” only to those functional intentions of which the artist was unconscious.— But since the meaning which the artist consciously employed in his work and that which he unconsciously employed often cannot be determined, a differentiation in the practice of interpretation is hardly applicable.

So we should leave Panofsky’s theory, which has been extremely successful for so many years, just as it stands.

Notes 2 Translated from German by Jackie Plötz. 1 For information about the art historians mentioned in this chapter see the World Wide Web and the following printed works: Encyclopedia of Art, ed. J. Turner, 34 vols. (Basingstoke, 1996ff.); Metzler Kunst historiker Lexikon, Von P. Betthausen, P.H. Feist und Chr. Fork unter Mitarbeit von K. Rührdanz und J. Zimmer (Stuttgart-Weimar, 2007), 2nd ed.; E. Panofsky, Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1968: Eine kommentierte Auswahl in fünf Bänden,

ed.

D.

Wuttke

(Wiesbaden,

2001-2011),

vol.

I:

Korrespondenz 1910-1936 (2001); vol. II: Korrespondenz 1937-1949 (2003); vol. III: Korrespondenz 1950-1956 (2006); vol. IV: Korrespondenz 19571961 (2008); vol. V: Korrespondenz 1962-1968 und Nachklänge 1969-1971 (2011); bibliographic data for the aforementioned art historians easily accessible in D. Wuttke, Kumulationen: Ergänzungsband zur ErwinPanofsky-Korrespondenz. Unter Mitarbeit von P. Schöner (Wiesbaden, 2014). This Supplement volume to the Erwin Panofsky correspondence contains: corrections and additions, the most complete bibliography of Panofsky’s writings 1914 through 1969/1973 with 319 bibliographical entries, the bibliography of the reviews concerning vols. I-V, the revised bio-bibliographical list of the correspondents of all volumes (141-606), the revised index of names and subjects of all volumes (607-963). For Panofsky’s life see the Korrespondenz and Kumulationen referenced earlier; K. Michels, “Panofsky, Erwin,” in Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 20 (Berlin, 2001), 36-38; H. Bredekamp, “Erwin Panofsky,” in Klassiker der Kunstgeschichte, vol. II, ed. U. Pfisterer (Munich, 2008), 61-75. Apart from Panofsky’s correspondence see two autobiographical essays by E. Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” and “Three Decades of Art History in the United States: Impressions of a

Transplanted European,” in E. Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, 1955, second edition, 1957; Doubleday Anchor Book A 59), 1-25 and 321-46; J. Bialostocki, “Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968): Thinker, Historian, Human Being,” Simiolus 4 (1970), 68-89; H. von Einem, “Erwin Panofsky zum Gedächtnis: Bibliographie der Rezensionen zu Schriften Erwin Panofskys,” ed. R. Heidt, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 30 (1968), 7-18. I wish to thank Jackie Plötz for translating this essay, and Petra Schöner for editorial assistance and the electronic processing of the images accompanying it. 2 See D. Wuttke, “From the Laboratory of a Cultural Historian: On Contacts between Mathematics, Science, the Humanities, and the Arts” (translation by Jackie Plötz), in Tales from the Laboratory or, Homunculus Revisited, ed. R. Görner (Munich, 2005), 11-38. 3 See C. Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture,” in C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), 3-30. 4 See notes 1, 6, 13, 21. 5 All other bibliographic data for this book and all other references to Panofsky’s publications can be found in the Panofsky-Bibliography in Wuttke, Kumulationen (as in note 1). 6 See Record of the Art Museum Princeton University, vol. XXVIII, no. 1, 1969, ed. H. Backlin-Landman. 7 See Record of the Art Museum Princeton University (as in note 6). There is an expanded version of seven pages with additional information about publications suggested by Panofsky and the honors bestowed on him, published privately 1970, but dated 1969. 8 See I. Lavin and M. Aronberg Lavin, Truth and Beauty at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, 2012). The study is freely available on the Internet. 9 Bialostocki, “Panofsky” (as in note 1), see 84. For a discussion on disguised symbolism see J.-B. Bedaux, The Reality of Symbols: Studies in the Iconology of Netherlandish Art 1400-1800 (The Hague, 1990), 9-53;

A. Arnulf, “Das Bild als Rätsel. Zur Vorstellung der verdeckten und mehrfachen Bildbedeutung von der Antike bis zum 17. Jahrhundert,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, N.F., 53 (2002), 103-62; see especially 113-21. 10 J. Fest, Wege zur Geschichte (Zurich, 1992), 127-28. 11 “Ebreo di sangue, Amburghese di cuore, d’anima Fiorentino” See G. Bing, Aby M. Warburg (Hamburg, 1958), 32. Concerning the dictum “expulsion into paradise” see Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. IV (as in note 1), 585, and vol. V, 1001. 12 See E. Panofsky, “Wilhelm Vöge, 16. Februar 1868-30. Dezember 1952,” in W. Vöge, Bildhauer des Mittelalters (Berlin, 1958), XXXI. 13 See D. Wuttke, “Panofskys Warburg - Warburgs Panofsky,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte 101 (2015), 87-113. See also D. Wuttke, “Erwin Panofskys Herculesbuch nach siebenundsechzig Jahren,” in the reprint of E. Panofsky, Hercules am Scheidewege und andere antike Bildstoffe in der neueren Kunst (Berlin, 1997), extrapagination 196; D. Wuttke, “L’Hercule â la croisée des chemins d’Erwin Panofsky: l’ouvrage et son importance pour l’histoire de l’art,” in Relire Panofsky, ed. R. Recht and F. Douar (Paris, 2008), 105-47. 14 E. Panofsky, Die Gestaltungsprincipien Michelangelos, besonders in ihrem Verhältniszu denen Raffaels, ed. Gerda Panofsky (Berlin/Boston, 2014). For Panofsky’s Habilitationsschrift see Wuttke, “Panofskys Warburg - Warburgs Panofsky” (as in notel3), then note 17, for compiled sources and notes on interpretation. For a critical review see D. Wuttke in Bibliographie zur Symbolik, Ikonographie und Mythologie 47 (2014), 90-93. 15 Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. V (as in note l), 168-69. 16 E. Panofsky, Deutschsprachige Aufsätze, ed. K. Michels and M. Warnke, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1998). In this edition the numbers 8, 14, 40, 48, 66, 84, 86, 164,

and

269

listed

in

the

Panofsky-Bibliographie

of Wuttke,

Kumulationen (as in note l), are missing. A collection and publication of Panofsky’s English essays are needed.

YJ_ E. Panofsky, Architecture gothique et pensée scolastique, précédé de l’abbé Suger de Saint-Denis. Traduction et postface de P. Bourdieu. Deuxième édition revue et corrigée (Paris, 1968); R. Marichal, “L’Écriture Latin et la psychologie des peuples,” in La XXIIe semaine de synthèse. Avec collaboration de M. Cohen et al. (Paris, 1963), 199-247, especially 234-38 and 241; C. Lévi-Strauss, “Structuralisme et critique littéraire,” Paragone (Letteratura) (1965), no. 182, 125-33. 18 Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vols. I-V (as in note 1) and the supplementary volume Wuttke, Kumulationen (as in note 1). 19 See the Korrespondenz-Nachtrag (KN) in Panofsky, Korrespondenz (as in note l), vol. V. Among her letters to Bargheer we find one of the most touching of all letters. See vol. V, no. KN 469a. 20 Von Einem, “Panofsky zum Gedächtnis” (as in note 1), especially 11. See Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. V (as in note 1), 941, fig. 80. See the correction note to von Einem, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 31 (1969), 334. For Panofsky as a Latinist see D. Wuttke, “Latein und Kunstgeschichte. Ein Beitrag zum Methodenproblem,” in Kunst, Politik, Religion. Studien zur Kunst in Süddeutschland, Österreich, Tschechien und der Slowakei: Festschrift für Franz Matsche zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. M. Hörsch and E. Oy-Marra (Petersberg, 2000), 177-91. 21 See P. Schöner, “Autobiographie in Briefen. Die Edition der ErwinPanofsky-Korrespondenz

ist

abgeschlossen.

Ein

Beitrag

zur

Wissenschaftsgeschichte,” Mensch/Wissenschaft/Magie. Österreichische Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Mitteilungen 29 (2012), 197210. The article ends with two examples from the Panofsky letters and a photo of 1958 showing Panofsky talking with the Polish art historian Jan Bialostocki. 22 Thus he does not discuss, for instance, the articles by K. Mannheim, “Beiträge zur Theorie der Weltanschauungs-Interpretation,” Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 1 (1921/22), 236-74, and by G.J. Hoogewerff, “L’iconologie et son importance pour P étude systématique de l’art chrétien,” Rivista d’archeologia Christiana (1931), 53-82, and not the book

concerning

the

history

of

types

by

H.

Cornell,

Karakteriseringsproblemet i konstvetenskapen: studier och bidrag tili konstbetraktandets och konstbeskrivandets utveckling (Stockholm, 1928). Panofsky quotes only that he adopted the term “Dokumentsinn” from Mannheim. See E. Panofsky, “Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der Bildenden Kunst,” Logos 21 (1932), 10319;

reprinted

in

E.

Panofsky,

Aufsätze

zu

Grundfragen

der

Kunstwissenschaft, ed. H. Oberer and E. Verheyen (Berlin, 1985), 85-97, 3rd ed., and in Bildende Kunst als Zeichensystem 1.: Ikonographie und Ikonologie, ed. E. Kaemmerling (Cologne, 1994), 185-206, 6th ed. See the English translation and commentary by J. Eisner and K. Lorenz: E. Panofsky, “On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts,” trans. J. Eisner and K. Lorenz, Critical Inquiry 38 (2011/12), 467-82, and J. Eisner and K. Lorenz, “The Genesis of Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 38 (2011/12), 483-512. For comprehensive information see the article, praised by Panofsky, by J. Bialostocki, “Iconography and Iconology,” Encyclopedia of World Art 7 (1963), 769-85 (quoting as well research articles concerning “Typenwanderung” and “Typenschöpfung9). Reliable information is also available from C. Cieri Via, Nei dettagli nascosto: Per una storia delpensiero iconologico (Rome, 1994). 23 For more information see Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. I (as in note 1), 673 (letter to Walter Friedländer). 24 See Panofsky, “Wilhelm Vöge” (as in note 12), and E. Panofsky, “Goldschmidts Humor,” in Adolph Goldschmidt zum Gedächtnis, 18631944, ed. C.G. Heise (Hamburg, 1963), 25-32. 25 See D. Wuttke, “Unbekannte Quellen zur Geschichte der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Ikonographische Studien,” in P. Schmidt, Aby M. Warburg und die Ikonologie, 2nd ed. (Wiesbaden, 1993), 47-89. 26 See Wuttke, “Panofskys Warburg - Warburgs Panofsky9 (as in note 13). 27 See Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. I (as in note 1), 404 (Panofsky’s first visit to the Index of Christian Art in Princeton University happened in 1931!), and Korrespondenz, vol. V (as in note 1), 216f. With respect to the greater context see C. Hourihane, “‘They Stand on His Shoulders’: Morey, Iconography, and the Index of Christian Art, Insights and

Interpretations,”

in

Studies

in

Celebration

of the

Eighty-Fifth

Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 2002), 3-16. 28 See the reprint of “Probleme der Kunstgeschichte” as in Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. I (as in note l), 957-64, and the critical note in Wuttke, Kumulationen (as in note l), 37f. The “Imago Pietatis” article was printed first in the Festschrift für Max J. Friedländer zum 60. Geburtstage (Leipzig, 1927), 261-308. It was reprinted in E. Panofsky, Deutschsprachige Aufsätze (as in note 16), 186-233. See note 32. 29 The first to adopt Panofsky’s definition of 1927 and connect it to his essay of 1932 “Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der Bildenden Kunst” (as in note 22) seems to have been G. von der Osten. See G. von der Osten, Der Schmerzensmann: Typengeschichte eines deutschen Andachtsbildwerkes von 1300 bis 1600 (Berlin, 1935), 130f; J. Baschet, “Inventivité et sérialité des images médiévales: Pour une approche iconographique élargie,” Annales 51 (1996), 93-133, reinvents Panofsky’s approach without knowing of Panofsky’s “Imago Pietatis” essay (as in note 28). 30 See Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. II (as in note 1), 138, with Fritz Saxl’s letter of September 2, 1938. As is well-known the book appeared only in 1964 under the title Saturn and Melancholy. The vicissitudes of its genesis are documented in Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vols. I-V (as in note 1). 31 See the afterword by D. Wuttke, “Erwin Panofskys Herculesbuch” (as in note 13). 32 Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. I (as in note l), 383. Cf. Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline” (as in note 1), especially 17, where he as one of the tasks of the art historian describes this: “He will observe the interplay between the influences of literary sources and the effect of self-dependent representational traditions, in order to establish a history of iconographic formulae or ‘types.’” 33 On Haseloff s sixtieth birthday Panofsky dedicated the following article:

E. Panofsky, “Der greise Philosoph am Scheidewege: Ein Beispiel für die ‘Ambivalenz’ ikonographischer Kennzeichen,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, N.F., 9 (1932), 285-90. 34 Logos 21 (1932), 103-19; for reprints, translations, and commentaries see note 22. 35 E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York, 1939), “Introduction,” 3-17; reprint as Harper Torchbook (New York, 1962). Panofsky again does not define the term “iconology” in the main text but in the preface of the Torchbook edition, p. V, he speaks of “iconological method.” E. Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, 1955), 2nd ed. (Garden City, 1957; Doubleday Anchor Book A 59), 26-41. This is the text in which Panofsky introduces and defines the term “iconology” for the third stage of the interpretation, in which iconological synthesis is contrasted to iconographical analysis. He gives no indication that the present text is a revised version of the text from 1939. 36 See Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. I (as in note 1), 404 (letter to Fritz Saxl) and 444 (letter to Dora Panofsky). 37 See Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. I (as in note 1), 673 (letter to Walter Friedländer). 38 With respect to “What Is Iconology” see Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. II (as in note 1), 1133f. The theme of iconography/iconology, which Panofsky frequently deals with in his correspondence, cannot the least be unfolded in this short chapter. For the references see the indices to the Korrespondenz, vols. I-V, easily accessible in the collection by Wuttke, Kumulationen (as in note 1). 39 See note 35. 40 E. Panofsky, Essais d’iconologie: Thèmes humanistes dans Tart de la Renaissance. Texte traduit par C. Herbette et B. Teyssèdre, présenté et annoté par B. Teyssèdre (Paris, 1967), 3-5. Panofsky’s letter to the Belgian art historian and diplomat Guy de Tervarent of February 17, 1966, printed in the Korrespondenz, vol. V (as in note l), 794f., is relevant

to this context. 41 See the indices of Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vols. IV and V (as in note 1), s.v. “Panofsky, Erwin, Dicta.” On the relationship between methods in theory and methods in application Panofsky reported in a letter to William S. Heckscher of April 7, 1960 (Korrespondenz, vol. TV, 667, as in note 1) the following: “I am just coming home from a symposium where all the young people applied the Warburg-Panofsky-Heckscher methods of interpretation in such a manner that I can say only ‘Obstupui, steteruntque comae et vox faustibus haesit.’” One has to read “faucibus” instead of “faustibus"; see Virgil, Aeneid, II, 774. Panofsky is quoting a student’s joke. The translation of the quotation after Virgil is: “I was stunned, my hair stood on end and my voice remained stuck in my throat.” 42 See Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. II (as in note 1), 217, note 9 (quotation from a letter to Rudolf Wittkower). See also vol. Ill (as in note l), 165 (letter to Günter Bandmann). 43 Only one example may be quoted: L. de Vries, “Iconography and Iconology in Art History: Panofsky’s Prescriptive Definition and some Art-Historical Responses to Them,” in Picturing Performance. The Iconography of the Performing Arts in Concept and Practice, ed. F.Th. Heck (Rochester, 1999), 42-64. The responses are by H. van de Waal, Chr. Tümpel, and M. Baxandall. 44 See Bandmann to Panofsky on March 23,

1962, in Panofsky,

Korrespondenz, vol. V (as in note l), 165-67. 45 See E. Panofsky, Studien zur Ikonologie der Renaissance, Mit einem Vorwort von J. Bialostocki und einem Nachwort von A. Beyer (Cologne, 1997), Bialostocki’s preface,

7-16, especially 12. See Bialostocki,

“Panofsky” (as in note l). 46 For more, see Wuttke, “Erwin Panofskys Herculesbuch” (as in note 13). 47 See R. van Straten, Iconography, Indexing, Iconclass: A Handbook (Leiden, 1994), 21; R. van Straten, Einführung in die Ikonographie, 3rd revised ed. (Berlin, 2004), 28. Finally I should like to point only to Max

ImdahF s

endeavors

to

replace

Panofsky’s

concept

of

iconography/iconology with the new concept of “Ikonik.” See Schmidt, Warburg und die Ikonologie (as in note 25), and recently F. Thürlemann, “Ikonographie, Ikonologie, Ikonik: Max Imdahl liest Erwin Panofsky,” in Bildtheorien: Anthropologische und kulturelle Grundlagen des Visualistic Turn, ed. K. Sach-Hombach (Frankfurt am Main, 2008), 214-34.

9 Charles Rufus Morey and the Index of Christian Art Colum Hourihane

Even though much of Charles Rufus Morey’s own scholarship has been superseded by more recent research, he is still justifiably remembered as the founder of the largest archive devoted to medieval iconography in existence: The Index of Christian Art, which is based in Princeton University and is now approaching the one hundredth anniversary of its foundation.1 He is also fondly remembered as one of the founders of the College Art Association, where his name has been given to the Charles Rufus Morey Award. This was established in 1953 and is given annually to a distinguished English language book in the history of art.- Even though it is not widely remembered now, Morey was one of the foremost supporters of the Art Bulletin for many years. Charles Rufus Morey, or “Morey” as he was most commonly known, was born in Hastings, Michigan, in 1877 and died in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1955 (Fig. 9.1). After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1899 he continued his studies at the same university for a further year before receiving his masters in classics. This was followed by a three-year fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies in Rome. While there, he further developed his all-consuming passion for Italian art and the classics. He was invited by Alan Marquand, the founder of the

Department of Art and Archaeology in Princeton University, to join the developing department in 1906, having been an instructor in classics at the university since 1903.- By 1907 he had extended the range of courses being taught in the university to include medieval art. His own scholarship focused on late antique/early medieval Italian art and its Christian context. He frequently traveled to Italy, and it was on one such visit that he stopped in Paris at an archive that had been iconographically catalogued into broad divisions, such as Portraits, Landscape, Religious Subjects, and so forth. Inspired by such a thematic approach he began to order his own personal collection of images on his return to Princeton. He immediately realized the potential of such an archive and the value of extending his own personal but limited holdings. This discovery was paralleled by what he called an interest in iconography that was found among his colleagues in the department in Princeton, among them being Albert M. Frend (who joined the department in 1921). In the broader world, this was the period when a considerable interest in iconography was developing thanks to scholars such as Didron, Warburg, and Mâle, and in many ways this was the American response. It has to be realized that this was the age when images were limited; the 35mm slide had not yet been invented and scholars were dependent on whatever they could get their hands on. Apart

Figure 9J Charles Rufus Morey. Image courtesy of the Index of Christian Art.

from whatever had been published, Morey’s own collection of images consisted of newspaper cuttings, photographs, and calendar cuttings. His good friend Erwin Panofsky had not yet come to the nearby Institute of Advanced Study, but that did not deter Morey from realizing the value of developing an iconographically catalogued archive of early Christian art (art up to AD 700). Undeterred by the lack of interest displayed by the university in developing such a resource, which declined financial support when he approached it, he was determined to proceed with the initiative. Before the university supported it, Morey with the assistance of volunteers started the process of adding images to his own

personal collection. For him, the real value of such a resource was the range of its holdings. Unlike Émile Mâle, who was content to deal with subjects and themes within medieval art on the basis of one or two works, Morey wanted as many examples of particular themes as he could collect. He wanted to see how themes and ideas developed in relation to society and culture, and this could be achieved only by amassing as many images as he could from as many contexts as was known. The volunteers initially went to the bibliographic holdings and surveyed the art historical books and journals for images that could be added to the resource. Once again it has to be remembered that art historical publications were limited, unlike the current situation. The paucity of publications led Morey and subsequent directors to claim every five years that they would finish the Index within ten years - a claim they abandoned when Helen Woodruff took up the directorship, realizing that what they knew about medieval art was extremely limited and did not reflect what existed in reality. Nowadays, the Index is barely able to keep up with the number of publications released every month, never mind every year. It is claimed that the Index was officially founded in 1917, at which stage the university took over official responsibility for its future, but in fact it had been going for three or four years before that. It was one of the first archives to develop standards and guidelines for cataloguing works of art, and these were published by Helen Woodruff in 1942, enabling other collections to follow the practices. These guidelines are still being used by the Index, although they have also been extended and added to over time. Perhaps a little too scholarly in approach, and more suited to the paper environment for which they were created, they are in need of being modernized and extended to reflect current terminology and methodologies. The collecting policy for images has also changed over time, and nowadays the Index has catalogued existing archives and entire collections and is no longer dependent on the published image.The terminus date for the Index has also changed since it was first created by Morey, and it now stands at 1550, reflecting the entire

medieval period and not just the interests of the founder. It was extended to 1400 before 1955 - the year Morey died, when he acknowledged that art did exist after 1400. His main concern was that iconography became ‘loose’ towards the end of the Middle Ages and that it did not relate to the early period. The final extension happened in 2000, with the later material being added to the archive from the Morgan Library Cataloguing Project. It is hoped that this later material will continue to be added, making the Index a comprehensive source for the study of medieval iconography. While developing the Index, Morey was at the same time pursuing his own academic career. His first paper was published in 1905, but it was not until the 1920s that he began to achieve acclaim for his pioneering work with such publications as Sources in Medieval Style (1924), East Christian Manuscripts (New York, 1920), The Illuminated Manuscripts of the J. Pierpont Morgan Library (1925), The Covers of the Lorsch Gospels with M. H. Longhurst (1928), Early Latin Illustrated Manuscripts (1929), The Landevennec Gospels: A Breton Illuminated Manuscript of the Ninth Century (1929), and The Genesis of Christian Art (1931). The first of these books, Sources in Medieval Style, was applauded by Erwin Panofsky as being as significant for art historians as Kepler’s work was for astronomers. Other studies were to follow, and 1942 appears to have been particularly important, with two pivotal works appearing: Early Christian Art: Outline of the Evolution of Style and Iconography in Sculpture and Painting from Antiquity to the Eighth Century (1942) and Medieval Art (1942). Although not known for his teaching abilities, he was an excellent administrator.- His generosity and sympathetic approach to life and people were much admired. Morey’s main strength was as a researcher and it was clearly his first love. He was far in advance of his time in the holistic approach he adopted to his work. In 1932 he published a pamphlet at his own expense on the role and function of the library under the title “A Laboratory-

Library,” in which he proposed what can be considered a revolution at that time as to how the library should work. He envisaged a unified library environment centered on faculty, student, and research space. For him, the library was not to be seen as a passive bibliographic archive but an active and living space in which interaction at all levels and between all participants was necessary. While undertaking such initiatives the Index was administered by scholarly medievalists, such as Helen Woodruff, who also managed to maintain their own academic profiles. It really was thanks to Morey that the Department of Art and Archeology became the prime center for medieval studies in North America at that time. He surrounded himself with scholars whose primary interest was in that period and included Donald Drew Egbert, Ernest DeWald, Kurt Weitzmann, and Alfred H. Barr. He was also responsible for inviting Erwin Panofsky to the nearby Institute for Advanced Study - a fellow scholar with a keen interest in iconography and how it is understood. Morey and Panofsky invested considerable scholarship into trying to see how the viewer looks at a work of art and how the subject matter can be objectively externalized to enable it to be described and retrieved by others. The Index of Christian Art was to provide an ideal and fertile resource for this to be undertaken. It is still a role which it fulfills. Morey was an all-round scholar who taught not only medieval but also Renaissance and modern art and expected all his colleagues to have the same eclectic approach. His notes now preserved at Princeton show an enquiring and sensitive mind who constantly attempted to understand man’s artistic legacy. For him, iconography was not an answer in itself but simply a reflection of society’s constant changes. His motivation was to understand why these changes took place and how they were manifested in the art of the period. Iconography did not work in isolation, and it was necessary to see it in relation to form, function, style, period, and all the elements that were invested in making the work in the first place. His approach was far in advance of his colleagues.

For most of his career, Morey and his wife, Sara (Frances Tupper), had a particular interest in Italian patrimony which was badly affected by World War II, and this led him to resigning his post at Princeton to become the first cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Rome (1945-1950), where he was heavily involved in repatriating works of art to their rightful owners. He acted as advisor to the Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in Europe between 1945 to 1950, and for his efforts he was awarded the Star of Italian Solidarity by the Italian government in 1952, a medal which now resides, thanks to the generosity of his daughter, in the Index of Christian Art in Princeton. He also became acting director of the American Academy during 1945-47. His energies and abilities to get things done were legendary, and he was responsible for developing and reestablishing many Italian libraries after the war and was at the forefront of developing Italian-American relations at this time. After leaving Italy he returned for a brief period to the Index of Christian Art in Princeton. Of his seventy-seven years of life, Morey was to spend thirty-nine of them at Princeton University, where he left an unrivalled legacy in the Index of Christian Art, which still occupies a premier position in medieval studies.

The Index The Index is an iconographic archive in which the subjects of works of art in eighteen different media, stretching from enamels to frescoes to wax and including manuscripts, ivories, sculpture, paintings, metalwork, and mosaics, are catalogued using a series of thesaurus-like subject headings, which number over twenty-eight thousand. Typical of such a heading is that of the Crucifixion: Christ Crucifixion, One Cross with Evangelist John

Christ Crucifixion, One Cross with Evangelist John and Longinus Christ Crucifixion, One Cross with Evangelist John and Stephaton Christ Crucifixion, One Cross with Longinus Christ Crucifixion, One Cross with Longinus and Stephaton Christ Crucifixion, One Cross with Longinus, Stephaton and Mary Magdalene Christ Crucifixion, One Cross with Mary Magdalene Christ Crucifixion, One Cross with Virgin Mary In the paper files each subject is catalogued under a primary heading which the researcher determines and cross-references to all the secondary subjects that are also included. So, for example, the researcher can determine that the main subject of a work of art is Christ; Crucifixion, but that other elements, such as the sun and moon, Virgin, and Saint John, are also of interest and need to be included. There is no limit to the number of such headings that can be used and these are all cross-referenced to the main subject heading. Subject headings are also supported by a free text description (again with no limit on words) in which controlled language is used to give an overall sense of the composition and includes such features as the relationship of one element to another, as well as gestures, coloration, and so forth. Each medium was given a different color card and they number in excess of five hundred thousand - for example, an orange card indicates metalwork whereas a blue one a manuscript. Other elements, such as date, specific type of work (missal, retable, etc.), ownership, and bibliography, are also given on each card. Accompanying this first file of subject headings and descriptions there is a second file consisting of close to two hundred thousand black and white images, which are filed under medium and then location. These rephotographs enable the user to see the work described and are simply reference images and do not include significant detail. In many ways the researcher in the Index deconstructs the work of

art under various subject headings but then reconstructs it photographically, and it is possible, for example, to see as many folios of a manuscript as have been published. In the past, the Index was largely dependent on published material but that approach was changed in the early 2000s, when the repository began photographing archives, libraries and collections that had not been previously photographed in their entirety (Fig. 9.2).

Figure 9^2 The Index of Christian Art showing the two paper files. On the right side is the subject file, consisting of the alphabetically arranged twenty-eight thousand subject headings, while on the left side is the photographic file.

As it presently stands the Index lies in two worlds, the analogue and the digital. Computers were introduced to the archive in 1991 when a bibliographic cataloguing module was modified for the archive. The main aim was to replicate the data amassed on the cards over the previous ninety years and to preserve the structure with all its intricacies. The data structure was complex, with over 150 fields.- A chance was also taken to bring the data recorded into more current use and fields such as School and Style were

included. Even though these had been purposely excluded by Morey as being subjective and personal, they have proved to be among the most popular. The application would be of considerable benefit as it would enable the data to be rapidly searched. The cataloguing standards employed in the archive before computers were impressive and in many ways were as close to modern metadata standards as was possible. When computers were introduced it has to be remembered that emphasis was placed on the textual elements and there was no image component to the records. The immediate task was to convert the paper files, which had been amassed over the previous ninety years, to the digital platform. This was no easy task as the information was out of date and needed to be thoroughly reinvestigated. It is a task which still continues, and nowadays over half the paper files have been converted, with all of the two hundred thousand black and white images already digitized. The Index does not own the copyright on the majority of these images, but thanks to the fact that many were taken over fifty years ago they are now out of copyright. Digital enhancement has enabled good-quality reference images to be offered to the researcher. Since 2000, the Index has made a conscious effort to acquire image collections as well as their copyright. These have come from libraries and museums as well as private collections. They are also now in color and the black and white requirement that operated in the past has been abandoned. In advance of computerization there were three other fully maintained paper copies of the Index available for consultation throughout the world. This was the solution that saved researchers the need to travel long distances to consult the resource. In 1999 an Internet application to the database was made available to the scholarly world and this has extended its use enormously. By opening up the resource both electronically and through hard-copy publications it has been enriched enormously, and scholars now give to the archive on an unparalleled basis. One of the main criticisms leveled at the Index was that its emphasis was on the art of the Western world and that the East had been neglected. This,

of course, also reflected scholarly interests and the main research in medieval art had always been undertaken in the West. The Index followed such initiatives and whatever had been undertaken in the Byzantine world was also included in the archive. Now, however, there is considerable research into Christian art underway in areas that were previously considered tangential. From 2000 efforts were made to redress this issue and the art of areas such as Coptic Egypt, Christian Syria, Jordan, Israel, Armenia, and so forth was catalogued. It is an issue which will be corrected over time but which will hopefully make the Index a more rounded research project. Secular art was never neglected in the archive and it was always contextualized in the broader field of medieval art. This continues unabated as it should but users need to be more aware of the coverage in the files. Given the wealth of iconographic material now available on the web, the Index is unique in what it is able to offer the researcher. Its strength has always been the scholarly approach of the cataloguers employed in the archive. They are professional art historians, and even though they all have their own particular strengths they are also able to diversify into other material. The application of computers to the Index has opened its resources to a much wider audience, but in doing so it has to be realized that its approaches need to change. In the past, the paper records were relatively limited and focused, but with the application of computers the opportunity was taken to extend the metadata enormously and the data structure now has over one hundred fields. Whereas such a structure is unrivalled, it has to be realized that it is impractical from the point of view of expediency. Given the wealth of new material that is constantly being exposed to medieval scholarship it is a project that is sure to exist for many years to come.

Notes

1 The most comprehensive publication on the Index, although also now slightly out of date, is by H. Woodruff, The Index of Christian Art at Princeton University (Princeton, 1942). Other publications on the Index and Morey include J.R. Martin, Art Bulletin 32 (1950), 345-59; E. Panofsky, “Charles Rufus Morey,” American Philosophical Society Year Book (1955), 482-91; R. Lee, “Charles Rufus Morey: 1877-1955,” Art Bulletin 37 (December 1955), iii-vii; New York Times August 30, 1955, p. 27. Obituary, p. 485; D.F. Blair Jr., “The Morey School, A Great Medieval Scholar Lives on in Art History,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, March 15, 1957, 6-11; R. Green, “The Index of Christian Art, Great Humanistic Research Tool,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, March 1, 1963, 8-16; A. Leitch, A Princeton Companion (Princeton, 1978); W.E. Kleinbauer, Research Guide to the History of Western Art, Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2 (1982), 62-63; L. Drewer, “What Can Be Learned from the Procedures of the Index of Christian Art,” The Index of Emblem Art Symposium, ed. P.M. Daly (New York, 1990), 121-38; I. Lavin, “Iconography

as

a

Humanistic

Crossroads),”

Iconography

at

Discipline

the

(Iconography

Crossroads:

at

the

Papers from

the

Colloquium Sponsored by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 23-24 March, 1990, ed. B. Cassidy (Princeton, 1992), 33-42; B. Cassidy, “Computers and Medieval Art: the Case of the Princeton Index,” Computers and Art History 4:1 (1993), 3-16; C. Hourihane (ed.), “The Princeton Index

of Christian Art,”

Visual Resources: An

International Journal on Images and Their Uses 13:3-4 (1998); C. Hourihane, “They Stand on His Shoulders: Morey, Iconography, and the Index of Christian Art,” in Insights and Interpretations: Studies in Celebrations of the Eighty-Fifth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art (Princeton, 2002), 3-16; A. Hershberger, “The Medium Was the Method: Photography and Iconography at the Index of Christian Art,” in Futures Past: Thirty Years of Arts Computing, CHArt Computers and the History of Art Yearbook, Vol. 2, ed. A. Bentkowska-Kafel, T. Cashen, and H. Gardner (Bristol/Portland, 2007), 63-76; C. Hourihane, “Classifying Subject Matter in Medieval Art: The Index of Christian Art at Princeton University,” in Classifying Content: Photographic Collections and Theories of Thematic Ordering, ed. C. Franc-eschini and K. Mazzucco,

Visual Resources: An International Journal on Images and Their Uses 30:3 (2014), 255-62. 2 See http://www.collegeart.org/awards/morey. 3 See C.H. Smyth and P. Lukehart (ed.), The Early Years of Art History in the United States (Princeton, 1993), and M.A. Lavin, The Eye of the Tiger, The Founding and Development of the Department of Art and Archaeology, 1883-1923, Princeton University (Princeton, 1983). 4 One of the first such initiatives and certainly the largest to date was the photographing and cataloguing of all the medieval manuscripts in the Morgan Library in New York. The premier repository for medieval manuscripts in North America, this project started in 2004 and was completed in 2013. 5 See Blair, “The Morey School” (as in note 1), 6. 6 Cassidy, “Computers” (as in note 1), 7.

10

Hans van de WaaL a Portrait Edward Grasman

Hans van de Waal, born as Henri van de Waal on March 3,1910, in Rotterdam, died on May 7, 1972, in Leiden (Fig. 10.1). His fame in the field of iconography rests on two outstanding achievements, his dissertation on the imaging of history and being the founding father of Icon-class. In publications focusing on him, especially those by Horst Gerson, Mechthild Beilmann, Roelof van Straten, and Eric Jan Sluijter, the greatest attention has been paid to these two achievements.1 In both his dissertation and his work on Iconclass, the subject of art was given a central position and both showed him to be a systematic and orderly man. Nobody can undertake a portrait of Van de Waal without paying attention to these aspects of his character. However, the following portrait will also accent other aspects of his personality, such as his religiosity, his capacity to change, and his love of craftsmanship, of which he was an idealistic promoter. In the second half of his life he focused on Jewish life, which he used in particular in his research on Rembrandt. It was at this same time that he came to appreciate modern art, which impacted his perceptions of that of the earlier periods. On July 12, 1940, when the Netherlands had been occupied by Nazi Germany for just two months, Van de Waal defended his dissertation at Leiden University, with the verdict cum laude. The dissertation, which had developed out of a paper published in 1937,

examined the way Dutch history had been visually represented.Due to the war, it took no less than twelve years before the book was finally published, in 1952. The dissertation can be seen as a lengthy introduction to Rembrandt’s Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis (Fig. 10.2) and in this it is comparable - also in the wealth of its information - to the study by Klibansky, Saxl, and Panofsky on Diirer’s Melancolia I, another book with a philological bent.Van de Waal demonstrated that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries typological reasoning not only comprised the Old and New Testament but also contemporary history. The inhabitants of the Republic opposing powerful Spain were compared to the first inhabitants of the Low Countries opposing Rome and the people of Israel rebelling against mighty Egypt, while William of Orange was compared with both Claudius Civilis and Gideon. The past was interpreted as symbolizing the present and the present was seen as a symbol of the future. It is likely that Joost van den Vondel’s literary works suggested this approach to him. For Vondel, typological reasoning was essential, as for example in his drama Pascha, written in 1612, in which the people of Israel symbolized Vondel’s Dutch contemporaries. Van de Waal’s main subject looked at the function of artworks, especially paintings and prints. Why did an artist, more often than not Rembrandt, choose a specific form to express specific

Figure 10.1 Hans van de Waal. Unknown photographer, date unknown, Leiden University Libraries.

Figure 1C2 The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis, Rembrandt (fragment, 196 x 309 cm, originally c. 550 x 550 cm), Stockholm, Royal Academy of Fine Arts (on loan to The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

content? In his dissertation, Van de Waal argued that in the Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, which was made for Amsterdam’s new town hall, Rembrandt ignored the rules of decorum. He transferred content into form without considering the representative function of the room which his painting was meant to adorn. Rembrandt had strictly followed Tacitus, who described Claudius Civilis as a one-eyed barbarian, but he should have realized that such a representation would never be acceptable to those who commissioned it, and whom Van de Waal in this way had defended.The subtitle of his dissertation made clear that he had chosen his method to be iconological. The goal of his beeld-leer, Dutch for “iconology,” was the study of the function of the image in a specific society, a definition that indicates close affinities with Warburg, focusing as it did on the complex processes of image formation (beeld-vorming) and image transfer (beeld-overdracht). In the English summary he stressed the semiotic connection by translating these two words as sign-formation and sign-transfer,

opening fields still hardly trodden by Dutch students of early modern art.Notwithstanding his affinity with Warburg, Van de Waal adopted an independent position toward him. He was aware of a lecture Warburg had delivered in 1926 in which attention was paid to Rembrandt’s Claudius Civilis.- Such was Warburg’s admiration for this picture that he had an accurate copy of it made. In this lecture Warburg maintained that penetrating art like Rembrandt’s was always likely to be defeated by “Lieferanten triumphaler Gegenwartsbejahung” (those who offer works that triumphantly affirm the present). Warburg showed little sympathy with those who had commissioned the work for the Amsterdam town hall and little understanding of the refusal of the Claudius Civilis, and in this he differed from Van de Waal. Another difference was that in Warburg’s opinion, the picture was a Rachebild expressing feelings of revenge on the part of Claudius Civilis after the killing of his brother Julius Paul, whose death had been remarked upon only in passing by Van de Waal. His reason for doing this can be inferred from a text he had already written in 1940, but which was published only in 1949. In the view of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury German authors, Rome was the enemy who had spoiled German glory, while their contemporaries in the Netherlands stressed that cooperation with the Romans by their ancestors, including Claudius Civilis, had been fruitful.Van de Waal’s second major claim to fame was the development of Iconclass, a refined classification of images according to their subjects (discussed elsewhere in this publication). Iconclass is the most visible result of his systematically functioning mind, but a drive toward systematization is clear in everything he undertook, even for instance in the way he constructed his papers. It is symptomatic that indexing was an important criterion in all his works, and it will come as no surprise that in this respect his dissertation is outstanding, with six registers possibly even a bit too much.

The DIAL (Decimal Index of the Art of the Low Countries) and Iconclass, which was the large-scale successor of DIAL, occupied Van de Waal’s daily activities. From 1934 onwards he worked as an assistant in the Print Room of Leiden University. With his promotion in 1945 to the position of professor of art history at the same university he became its director. Initially, Iconclass was designed to classify the collections of the Print Room. This classification consists of nine main categories: the supernatural, nature, man, society, abstracts, history, Bible, nonclassical mythology, and finally classical mythology. In 1968, Van de Waal still believed that Iconclass would be finished within five years, but this turned out to be quite an underestimation. The project was finished only in 1985, after decades of close cooperation with the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie in The Hague. One of the reasons it took much longer than expected was the later decision to add a bibliography. In the course of time Iconclass developed into a very detailed system with the advantage of being able to adapt it to the specific needs of its various users. Iconclass proves that, when needed, Van de Waal was not only a systematic man but also flexible. During the time it was being developed decisions had to be made on an ad hoc basis, a kind of pragmatism that caused some inconsistencies. However, not all inconsistencies resulted from ad hoc decisions: the main category of the Bible is not classified according to name, while both main mythological categories are; subcategories of the Old Testament are strictly classified according to chronology, while those of the New Testament are much less so. Van de Waal was responsible for the general design of Iconclass, but gradually his role became that of a distant controller of the process, with his assistants taking over many of the responsibilities involved. Van de Waal accepted his professorial position with a speech entitled Traditie en Bezieling (Tradition and inspiration).- Many of his publications move between these two poles. In his address he remarked on two disturbing facts: in art history any question might be considered scientific except for one questioning the

subject of a work of art and art history unhappily developed at a time - referring to the days of Bredius and Hofstede de Groot when many practitioners in the sister study of literature had turned their back on philology. This discipline would have made art historians ask other kinds of questions, such as he did in his dissertation. It cannot have been much of a surprise to him that both Vogelsang and Friedländer, to whose Festschrift he had contributed in 1942, reacted rather remotely to his oration, while the most sympathetic responses came from abroad, from art historians including Panofsky, Saxl, and Stechow.The speech took place on 22nd March 1946, not even a year after the ending of World War II. Van de Waal had spent the wartime in the Netherlands. From the end of September 1943 to the spring of 1945 he was in Durchgangslager Westerbork, which for many was a stopover on their way to Auschwitz. Just a few months before the war started he had married in Switzerland. On December 28, 1939, he married Liliane Henriette Dufresne, who was Swiss by birth, but out of a sense of duty to the Print Room they returned to Leiden, quite aware of the dangerous situation in nearby Nazi Germany. The time he was forced to spend in Westerbork was a caesura in his life, not least because it ruined his health. It made him aware of his Jewish origins and this awareness would leave an imprint on many of his subsequent publications. However, the main thing he learnt at Westerbork was not to attach any value to possessions.— Unlike so many others who were transported from Westerbork to the East, he was allowed because of his mixed marriage to go home before the war ended. This favor did not ease his pain when forced to come to terms with this brutal episode in his life. Unusually, his father, who was trained as a goldsmith in Germany, spoke German fluently, and never wore the Star of David, was hardly ever bothered by the Nazis. From the late 1960s Van de Waal decided to respect the Sabbath. He made it into a day of study, strictly observing its rituals, going to the synagogue on foot, and having others switch on lights for him. His intention to devote himself completely to the study of the

Talmud after his retirement was prevented by his unexpected death, slightly after his sixty-second birthday. Another reason why he longed for the solitude of his study was the democratization of his beloved university. He could not cope with the criticism leveled at the institute he had created with such care. Despite this, he could always be approached by his students, whom he supported in their own free decisions, seeing them move into remarkably different directions. In Westerbork he had found some solace in Fromentin’s Les Maîtres d’autrefois (1876), which he translated and commented upon. The archive Van de Waal kept at the RKD contains the moving results of this research.— The book was expected to appear in 1944, but just like the dissertation it took many years before it was published. It finally appeared in 1951, under the title De meesters van weleer (The masters of ere).— The main attraction for him must surely have been that it is a book by a craftsman on his craft, and it is likely that he recognized something of himself in Fromentin, who criticized developments within the art of painting in his own time. Van de Waal’s commentary on Fromentin contains a singular remark in which he qualified the importance of the subject. After noting how important a “source of secondary inspiration” the literature of the Romantic era had become for music and the visual arts, he commented, The reaction was unavoidable. One does not transfer without consequences the accent from the quintessence to side-issues and in the case of the visual arts and music the subject, the “story” remains secondary. The purely artistic qualities, resulting from the nature of the used technique, will always have to remain in the center of the artist’s attention.—

This sentence survived all the editing of his commentary on Fromentin. He was not exclusively focused on the subject and, much like Panofsky, he kept his distance from those tendencies

within iconology which moved in that direction. Van de Waal’s teaching was no less systematic than his other activities. In it he further developed his beeld-leer, which revolved around three elements basic to any work of art: form, content, and function, a triangle proclaimed to be the holy writ by his students.— He never intended to publish his beeld-leer because it had to remain a flexible instrument. No matter how fundamental the various elements were to his teaching and his research, he never defined them. “Function,” for example, at one time might refer to the use of artistic means within a work of art, at another time to the work of art in its original context. Both the commentary on Fromentin and the dissertation lacked any references to the Talmud, and it was also still absent from the preface to In Memoriam 1940-1945, which he wrote in 1952 on occasion of a stained-glass window being commissioned by Leiden University.— An indication of his increasing interest in Judaism is offered when a comparison is made between the two versions of the DIAL from 1958 and 1968. In 1958 a category on non-Christian religions has been mentioned (category 12), but only in 1968 was this category worked out in a detailed manner, beginning with a whole series of subcategories on Jewish religion. However, this was several years after Van de Waal had already revealed his knowledge of Judaism in a paper on Rembrandt’s etchings which were meant to illustrate a book called Piedra Gloriosa by Menasseh ben Israel.— In Van de Waal’s opinion these prints testified to Rembrandt’s esteem of the Jewish people. During the Rembrandt celebrations in 1956 he repeatedly displayed his interest in Judaism, as for example in a lecture he delivered in Leiden’s Peter’s Church, which was titled “Rembrandt and Ourselves,” in which he honored the century-old tradition of Dutch tolerance toward Jews.— After 1956 Van de Waal’s interest in Judaism frequently showed up, most clearly perhaps in an article from 1969 on Rembrandt’s painting known as Haman in Disgrace.— He considered the choice

of an ostensibly calm moment in this particular story in the Bible as characteristic of the development Rembrandt had gone through, in relation to form as well as iconography. He identified the figures as Haman, Ahasuerus, and the chamberlain Harbonah, the old man whose presence had been a problem for all earlier interpretations. He suggested that Harbonah was Elijah in disguise and the actual subject of the picture was the intervention in this world by the hidden God. This paper not only demonstrated his great knowledge of Judaism in seventeenth-century Amsterdam but also at the same time announced a theme which would become an important topic in art history decades later, the painting of the invisible. In the review of Steps towards Rembrandt, a collection of articles by Van de Waal which he himself had helped prepare but which was published posthumously, Joos Bruyn identified the author with Rembrandt.— Elie Wiesel defined the Talmud as “a dialogue with the living and the dead.”— Is it too farfetched to assume that Van de Waal, while working in the silence of his study during Sabbath, identified himself with a Talmudic scholar, in dialogue not with Hillel but with Rembrandt? Van de Waal’s decision to focus on Judaism followed a period in which he seemed to have approached religion in a more general way. A lecture he delivered in 1964 during a so-called Open Veld (Open Field) meeting certainly had religious connotations, but they were not specifically Jewish.— When he published this lecture five years later, in Delta, he almost completely ignored the religious element.— It is possible that he did not consider it to be sufficiently scientific or maybe the editors thought so. Anyway, it was exactly this religious dimension which gave the text its rare beauty. The Open Field meetings were organized by Greet Hofmans, a religiously inspired woman who played a remarkable role in Dutch history because of her ties with Queen Juliana. It was due to the malicious way her relationship with Queen Juliana was presented in the international press that the Dutch monarchy almost came to

an end. Van de Waal was asked to give a talk at the Open Field meeting on the meaning of light and dark for mankind and as to whether light existed without shadow. He began his lecture by quoting from the Old and New Testaments, and continued by illustrating problems with Rembrandt’s use of chiaroscuro as a visual technique. This led him to conclude first that the youthful Rembrandt tried to systematically master visual techniques in his self-portraits, a point of view later affirmed by the Rembrandt Research Project; second, the ways in which Rembrandt used chiaroscuro to suggest a dialogue as in the Disputing Scholars from Melbourne; third, the reasons why he was always moved by the Titus from Rotterdam, where the boy seems to exist on the threshold of light and dark, on the borderline of knowing and not knowing, which is so characteristic of youth; and finally about the absence, unheard of in the seventeenth century, of space in Rembrandt’s ultimate self-portrait, in Cologne. This lecture clearly shows that Van de Waal’s view of Rembrandt, certainly after the war, was imbedded in religiosity. During this same lecture he touched on photography, also in a religious context, pointing out that this art lives by converting light into dark and vice versa. With the acquisition of the Gregoire collection by the Print Room in 1953, Van de Waal became a pioneer in the Netherlands in collecting photography, both the photographs themselves and the tools used to make them. Moreover, he introduced photography as part of the art history teaching program at Leiden University, from a theoretical and practical perspective. It was through one of his mother’s kinsmen, Richard Polak, that he had become acquainted with this branch of art. In particular, he admired the skills and craftsmanship of photographers like Polak. Van de Waal’s high esteem for craftsmanship was inherited from his uncle, the portrait painter Jos Seckel, and of course from his father, whose activities he had carefully observed. In West-

erbork he profited from these close observations when he was made responsible for repairing the wheelbarrows. As if to show how close to his heart craftsmanship was, the archive at the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie has a piece of paper on which he wrote down, probably during the late 1960s, that had his retirement started at that moment he would concentrate on calligraphy, woodworking, or glassblowing as well as Hebrew.— Both his sons dearly remember how much care and discernment their father gave to ensure that everything from toys to vacuum cleaners worked well. The Grégoire collection had a particular impact on him, not so much for what it contained but for what it lacked. Grégoire had considerable holdings for photographers such as Henri Berssenbrugge and Polak, but at some time Van de Waal realized that both of these, including his kinsman, were dead ends. Mistakenly, they had based their medium on painting. In 1967 Van de Waal stated his criticism explicitly in a preface to a book on Berssenbrugge, but everything suggests he had come to the same conclusion years before.— Experimental photography, such as that presented by Hajek-Halke in 1955, was an eye-opener to him. He enthusiastically commented on those photographers who had been influenced by Moholy-Nagy’s experiments in the 1920s and who no longer took painting or one of the other arts as their point of departure. Their pictures were exclusively grounded in photography itself.— It was on these same pages in 1956 that Van de Waal revealed some reservations about perspective: “The art of the Renaissance went to such lengths in her craving for mathematical exactness, that in her imaging of this phenomenon she strove for an orthogonal projection of it which was as accurate as possible.” However, according to him, this was not the domain of photography; her domain was “the representation of the texture of matter.” One year later he wrote an introduction to an exhibition of photography held in Brussels, The Hague, and Cologne which showed abstract photographs by Pirn van Os, among others. The

exposition itself was called Images Inventées but the title of his introduction was “The World in Which We Live.” Van de Waal came to the conclusion that “the impeccable presentation by way of perspective” had lost terrain since the beginning of the twentieth century to “the interest in structure.” He was thinking of the nonfigurative creations of Klee and Kandinsky, which were, as he noted, no longer composed within a given framework, but might be expanded to all sides.— In 1952 he had been critical of cubism. Making a principle of abstraction, he wrote at the time, was a dangerous decision, because it might involve crossing “the natural boundaries of the visual arts,” with the geometrical figures of cubism as the unavoidable consequence.— Twelve years later, in 1964, he was responsible for a television program on modern art and this time his attitude toward cubists was much more positive. They combined various views of the same object in their paintings, and in doing so with impeccable instinct they anticipated technical developments, while at the same time already showing a sense of simultaneity, which would become a characteristic of later times.— His increased appreciation of modern art had implications for his approach to earlier art, particularly Rembrandt. A paper from 1956 on the Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis neatly followed the text of his dissertation from four years earlier, and the sentence quoted here about Rembrandt’s rivalry with Leonardo and Tintoretto is almost verbatim in both: “In his zeal to equal them he struggled with formal problems of which his commissioners had not the faintest notion.” The only difference, and it seems to me to be a significant one, is that in 1956 the word “formal” had been added.— Van de Waal’s famous article on the Syndics (Fig. 10.3) from 1956 is preceded by a motto taken from Dvorak according to which the development of modern art had opened eyes to the quality of earlier art, and it is in this same vein that the article is finished: “In as much as the art of our own day has enabled us once again to appreciate the value of composition on a flat surface, we are better

able to understand certain aspects of Rembrandt’s artistry.”— It appears that those aspects we have become more appreciative of are those formal problems he had observed in his other paper. In his article on the Syndics Van de Waal protested against psychological interpretations, arguing that the gestures of those represented were not directed at some presupposed viewer and that the picture was no snapshot either. On the contrary, Rembrandt had endeavored to suggest repose - be it a tense kind of repose - and unity within the group. It was out of the question that he might have intended to suggest an interruption from the outside. Van de Waal concluded that the unity of this group of people enclosed within a frame removed them from reality. It was precisely this element of enclosure within a frame that was challenged by Puttfarken in 2000. According to Puttfarken, Van de Waal projected upon the Syndics the kind of formal analysis Clement Greenberg had applied to contemporary American painting.— Van de Waal was convinced that formal problems in the visual arts had to be considered primarily as problems of space. That is why he advocated systematic research on the structure of space suggested in Rembrandt.— In his Open Field lecture in 1964 he expressed the opinion that Rembrandt had gained in profundity the moment he deliberately abandoned the Renaissance system of perspective, until in his final self-portrait any indication of space was absent. In that painting Rembrandt pictured himself standing on the threshold of light and dark. In the version of this lecture Van de Waal published five years later he wrote that Caravaggio had attacked the Renaissance sense of space by suggesting a movement out of the picture and in an intuitive way he was followed in this by Rembrandt, particularly in his last self-portrait. Clearly, for Van de Waal a gulf existed between the man who painted the Syndics and the man who painted this final selfportrait: in the first the frame enclosed the represented group; in the second the frame was ignored.

Figure 103 Portraits of the Syndics of the Amsterdam Clothmasters’ Guild, Rembrandt, 1662, oil on canvas, 191.5 x 279 cm, The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

It is possible that photography opened Van de Waal’s eyes to modern art, while modern art made him aware of certain aspects of earlier art, especially that of Rembrandt. Van de Waal never wrote a comprehensive study on Rembrandt and this was not caused by his premature death. However, the enormous insights in his Steps towards Rembrandt offer every reason for it to be seen as his third great achievement, next to his dissertation and Iconclass. The only review to appear after the publication of his dissertation was written by the historian Pieter Geyl, but it was not until 1971 that the art historian Jan Bialostocki reviewed it in an art historical magazine, The Art Bulletin.— As it happens, Van de Waal just lived to see his dissertation, a work which he had begun thirty-four years earlier, finally reviewed in an appropriate journal. He always suffered from what he considered to be a lack of appreciation. Would his qualities have been more appreciated if he had continued to do what he did in his dissertation? It might be argued that because he kept changing his course, his dissertation

was more of an ending than a beginning. It stands to reason that there are several constant factors in his oeuvre, such as an interest in theatre - for example, in the article on Haman - and in ephemeral architecture - for instance, in his posthumous publication on Rembrandt’s Ecce Homo.— However, he did not publish anything further on typologies and although he remained interested in iconographical groups, his papers specifically dealing with this topic are scarce. This phenomenon took on a central position only in Hagar in the Desert, a paper that appeared before his dissertation.— In it, he briefly formulated a program for future research on iconographical groups in the work of Rembrandt: the appearance of angels to mortals, the ruler on his throne, and female nudity in nature. The first mentioned subject he discussed in his paper on Hagar, but he never published on the other two. However, in his 1961 article on Rembrandt’s etching of Faustus, he identified yet another iconographical group of the inspired scholar in his study, with the accurate conclusion that Rembrandt in this etching succeeded in finding a balance between interruption and concentration.— Van de Waal did not leave behind an extensive bibliography. His combined obligations as professor in art history and director of the Print Room left him insufficient time to undertake much research. In his work with the Print Room he was involved with museum problems. His opinions regarding such institutions paralleled those on art history and he suggested a shift of attention in the museum from style to function. Van de Waal not only lacked time to publish but also seemed to have lacked the inclination. Had it been his intention to build up a large bibliography he would not have devoted that much time to the idealistic goal of developing the aesthetic and creative capacities of secondary school pupils. “What our generation lacks,” he wrote, “is the cautiousness and wisdom of the carpenter and the gardener who have learnt, while creating, to listen to their material.”— He considered it his duty to stimulate that mental

attitude, in which skillfulness and craftsmanship played such a prominent role. Craftsmanship was the subject of a paper from 1967 on the reception of a famous anecdote told by Pliny.— Apelles visited Protogenes at Rhodes, but when he did not find him at home, he drew an extremely fine line in color on an already prepared panel. On arriving home, Protogenes identified the visitor who had drawn that line and before leaving home again, he drew an even thinner line over the earlier one, in another color. When Apelles next called and he did not find Protogenes at home, he cut the lines with an even thinner line in a third color, and hereupon Protogenes realized his defeat. The rivalry between these two famous antique painters exclusively concerned manual skill and craftsmanship and that is precisely why later commentators had such problems with it. They amplified Pliny’s story, suggesting it really was about contours or perspective. What these later writers had in common, according to Van de Waal, was “the silent and intuitive failure to acknowledge skilled workmanship as the basis of art.”— Steps towards Rembrandt contains one text which had not been published before and consequently appeared posthumously. It is a fitting end to this portrait of Van de Waal because it again proves his affinity with craftsmanship. The text is about Rembrandt’s etching known as Le Petit Orfèvre (Fig. 10.4), which shows a metalworker carefully handling a statue of Caritas in his studio.— The etching was no genre piece or portrait, as had been suggested, but according to Van de Waal it was the representation of a scene told in Judges 13-16, which had never been visualized before. He consistently believed that Rembrandt had a deep acquaintance with the Bible. The element on which the statue rests could not be an anvil, because - and here Van de Waal’s affinity with the craftsman becomes manifest - no craftsman would put an anvil on a workbench. It is a pedestal on which the smith is cautiously fixing his sculpture. Van de Waal not only called attention to

Rembrandt’s identification with this metalworker but also convincingly argued that the etching was a combination of originality and tradition. And this of course brings us back to the speech he delivered in 1946. His final conclusion on this etching is that it was a true emblem of Rembrandt’s own personality. I would like to add that his paper, in its logical construction and careful speculation on Rembrandt, is no less an emblem of Van de Waal’s own personality.

Figure 10A Le Petit Orfèvre, also known as The Goldsmith, Rembrandt, etching, 7.7 * 5.6 cm, first state of three (B123, 1655), Leiden University

Libraries.

Notes 1 H. Gerson, “Herdenking van Hans van den Waal (3 maart 1910-7 mei 1972),” Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen Jaarboek 1972 (Amsterdam 1973), 166-80; M. Beilmann, “Hans van de Waal (19101972),” in Altmeister moderner Kunstgeschichte, ed. H. Dilly (Berlin, 1990), 204-19; R. van Straten, Iconography, Indexing, Iconclass: A Handbook (Leiden, 1994), 83-95; E.J. Sluijter, “Traditie en bezieling: Henri van de Waal (1910-1972),” in Kunstgeschiedenis in Nederland: Negen opstellen, ed. P. Hecht, A. Hoogenboom, and C. Stolwijk (Amsterdam, 1998), 145-68. 2 H. van de Waal, Drie eeuwen vaderlandsche geschied-uitbeelding 15001800: Een iconologische Studie, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1952); “’s Lands oudste verleden in de voorstelling van Vondel en zijn tijdgenooten,” Elsevier's

Geillustreerd Maandschift 47

(1937),

297-318.

English

translation in H. van de Waal and R.H. Fuchs, Steps towards Rembrandt: Collected Articles 1937-1972 (Amsterdam/London, 1974), 44-72. 3 R. Klibanski, E. Panofsky, and F. Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (New York, 1964). 4 Van de Waal, Drie eeuwen (as in note 2), I, 231-38. 5 Van de Waal, Drie eeuwen (as in note 2), I, 4 and 297. 6 P. van Huisstede, De Mnemosyne Beeldatlas van Aby M. Warburg, een laboratorium voor beeldgeschiedenis (Leiden, 1992), 126-39. 7

H.

van

de

Waal,

“Nederlands-Duitse

tegenstellingen

in

de

geschiedschrijving der Renaissance,” De Gids 112 (1949), 98-108. 8 H. van de Waal, Traditie en bezieling (Rotterdam/Antwerp, 1946). 9

Archive

H.

van

de

Waal,

Rijksbureau

voor

Kunsthistorische

Documentatie, The Hague, 0625, box 3 and Van Straten, Iconography (as

in note 1), 32-33; H. van de Waal, “De zoons van Cornells Engelbrechtsz. of Jan de Cock, alias ‘Jan van Leyen’? Een kleine bijdrage tot een groot probleem,” in Aan Max J. Friedländer 1867-5 juni - 1942, ed. H.E. van Gelder (The Hague, 1942), 37-39. 10 Archive Van de Waal (as in note 9), box 3, folder Rotary. 11 Archive Van de Waal (as in note 9), box 2. 12 E. Fromentin and H. van de Waal, De Meesters van Weleer (Rotterdam, 1951). 13 Van de Waal, Meesters van Weleer (as in note 12), 291. 14 H. Locher, “Lévi-Strauss en de structurele bestudering van de kunst,” in Opstellen

voor

H.

van

de

Waal,

ed.

L.D.

Couprie

a.o.

(Amsterdam/Leiden, 1970), 113. 15 H. van de Waal, “Beschrijving der gedenkramen,” in In Memoriam 19401945, ed. J.H. Boeke (Leiden, 1952), 15-18. 16 H. van de Waal, “Rembrandts Radierungen zu Piedra Gloriosa,” Imprimatur, ein Jahrbuch für Bücherfreunde 12 (1954/1955), 52-61. English translation in Steps towards Rembrandt (as in note 2), 113-32. 17 H. van de Waal, “Rembrandt en wij,” De Gids 119 (1956), II 40-44. English translation in Steps towards Rembrandt (as in note 2), 7-12. 18 H. van de Waal, “Rembrandt and the Feast of Purim,” Oud Holland 84 (1969), 199-233. Also in Steps towards Rembrandt (as in note 2), 201-46. 19 Steps towards Rembrandt (as in note 2); J. Bruyn in Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 87 (1974), 466. 20 E. Wiesel, Wise Men and Their Tales (New York, 2003), 291. 21 Archive Van de Waal (as in note 9), box 1. 22 H. van de Waal, “Light and Dark: Rembrandt and Chiaroscuro,” Delta 12/2 (Summer 1969), 74-88. Also in Steps towards Rembrandt (as in note 2), 13-27. 23 Archive Van de Waal (as in note 9), box 3, folder Rotary.

24 H. van de Waal, “Voorwoord,” in H J. Scheffer, Portret van een fotograaf: Henri Berssenbrugge 1873-1959 (Leiden, 1967), 5-11. 25 H. van de Waal, “H. Hajek-Halke, Experimentelle Fotografie, Bonn, 1955,” Fotorama 5/11 (1956), 171-72. 26 H. van de Waal, “De wereld waarin wij leven,” in Catalogue Exposition Internationale de Photographies (Brussels/The Hague/Cologne, 1957). 27 Van de Waal, Drie eeuwen (as in note 2), 9. 28 H. van de Waal, “Moderne tijd - moderne kunst,” Openbaar Kunstbezit (TV) 2 (1964), nr. 5. 29 Drie eeuwen (as in note 2), 231; H. van de Waal, “The Iconological Background of Rembrandt’s Civilis” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 25 (1956), 22. Also in Steps towards Rembrandt (as in note 2), 34. 30 H. van de Waal, “De Staalmeesters en hun legende,” Oud Holland 71 (1956), 88. English translation in Steps towards Rembrandt (as in note 2), 247-92. 31 T. Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1400-1800 (New Haven, 2000), 12-16. 32 H. van de Waal, “De vormstructuur van het symbolisme,” De Gids 120 (1957), 329; H. van de Waal, “Rembrandt 1956,” Museum 61 (1956), 20506. 33 P. Geyl, Bijdragen voor de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 9 (1955), 14244; J. Bialostocki in The Art Bulletin 53 (1971), 262-65. 34 H. van de Waal, “Enige mogelijke bronnen voor Rembrandts ets Ecce Homo (1655),” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 23 (1973), 95-113. English translation in Steps towards Rembrandt (as in note 2), 182-200. 35 H. van de Waal, “Hagar in de woestijn door Rembrandt en zijn school,” Nederlands

Kunsthistorisch

Jaarboek

1

(1947),

145-69.

English

translation in Steps towards Rembrandt (as in note 2), 90-112. 36 H. van de Waal, “Rembrandt’s Faust Etching, a Socinian Document, and the Iconography of the Inspired Scholar,” Oud Holland 79 (1964), 6-48.

Also in Steps towards Rembrandt (as in note 2), 133-81. 37 H. van de Waal, “Creatieve vorming een landsbelang,” in Gedenkbundel studiedagen VAEVO 1908-1958 (1958), 61. 38 H. van de Waal, “The ‘Linea summae tenuitatis’ of Apelles; Pliny’s Phrase and Its Interpreters,” Zeitschrift für Aesthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 12 (1967), 5-32. 39 Van de Waal, Linea summae tenuitatis (as in note 38), 10. 40 H. van de Waal, “Rembrandt’s Etching Le petit orfèvre: Genre Piece, Portrait or Biblical History?,” in Steps towards Rembrandt (as in note 2), 233-46.

11

Meyer Schapiro as Iconographer Patricia Stirnemann

Meyer Schapiro (1904-1996) came to New York from Lithuania at the age of three, attended college and graduate school at Columbia University, and taught there throughout his career.1 As an art historian, he was a polymath: medievalist, modernist, historiographer, semiologist, and philosopher. A voracious autodidact with a prodigious memory, he also had a dab hand as an artist, translated Baudelaire, and wrote poetry himself. In his youth he taught himself German, which suddenly unlocked a whole universe of visual analysis and reasoning that was virtually unknown in the United States. To judge its effect, one need only look at the bibliography listed at the end of his article on style, published in 1953.- Out of twenty-three books cited, nineteen are in German (with special attention to Riegl and Wofflin), one in French (Focillon), and three in English. Eighteen of the cited works date before 1930. As a philosopher one might say that he explored the epistemology and philosophy of visual language. His exposure to each new way of looking - Riegl, Boas, semiotics, Marx, Freud, the art of the twentieth century - extended his reach into new realms of thought, which led to his resistance to any binding theoretical carapace, to a sort of humility of seeing. It is unlikely that anyone would describe Meyer Schapiro as an iconographer. If we restrict our attention to his work on medieval iconographical problems, we approach his thought piecemeal

through the far end of the telescope. Our vision would be even further reduced were we to eliminate the iconography of ornament and the formal aspects of iconography. Over and over, Meyer Schapiro emphasizes that meaning is inherent in the composition and in the rendering of the formal elements and signs, and he forges new vocabularies of description in his search for the meanings of iconographies. His intricate descriptions oblige one to look repeatedly at a carving or painting, as new physical aspects, meanings, and relationships are revealed. Recognizing the tremendous breadth of his restless intellect,- it is interesting to see how he discusses iconography, what he chooses to discuss and what he omits, rejects, or overlooks, what tools he uses in his research, the relative acceptance or correctness of his interpretations, and the responses they have generated. These last, the responses, are a clear tribute to his stimulating provocation to question, analyze, search further, and think anew. In his relatively small corpus of published papers, Schapiro examines medieval iconography in several ways. The two published papers taken from his dissertation on Moissac and his earliest articles deal mainly with a formal, visual reading of an iconography that demands a sympathetic understanding on the part of the modern spectator, a viewer who must put aside late antique and Renaissance naturalism as aesthetic yardsticks. Beginning in the 1940s, he publishes several papers where he deciphers the content of an unusual scene or object and explains its context (e.g., Ruthwell Cross, Disappearing Christ, Merode Altarpiece, Joseph Scenes on the Chair of Maximianus). In the 1950s and 1960s, the content is treated within the context of the study of a single object or monument that he is attempting to date and localize, in which case he is using details of the iconography as indicators within a larger argument (e.g., Castelseprio, Parma Ildefonsus, Glazier Psalter). Late in his career, he begins regrouping patterns, types, uses, and interpretations of iconography across time and space, as in the essays in Words,

Script and Pictures: Semiotics of Visual Language, where he explores the artist’s reading of the text, themes of state and themes of action, full-face and profile as symbolic form, and writing in images. While the more purely iconographical studies are often archaeological or positivist in tone, the last papers permit the author to explore iconography and style diachronically, to develop freely the interaction of content and form and their inflected, possible readings. He published no new work after the age of seventy, returning to earlier articles or unpublished studies, which he polished and gathered together in five well-indexed volumes of selected papers.- These in turn have now been translated into several languages. Like A. Riegl, his life’s work has become accessible worldwide only recently and posthumously. In his various approaches to medieval art, Schapiro’s style differs. The formal analyses of iconography can be voluble and emotive, while those presenting arguments concerning sources and chronology can be much more densely threaded, economical, frustratingly meagre in their illustration, and sometimes more abrupt in their transitions, conclusions, affirmations, and suggestions. The late essays, which were originally conceived as lectures or developments presented in his classes, flow rapidly as Schapiro speaks to the images and reads their many nuances. Throughout his life, Schapiro’s published work was interwoven with his teaching, which constantly added new observations and ideas to the work in print in a much freer and extraordinarily wide-ranging manner. For this reason, his students may have understood him best, notably John Plummer in his article “Insight and Outlook” and Ilene Forsyth in her articles “Narrative at Moissac, Schapiro’s Legacy” and “Word Play in the Cloister at Moissac.”- Forsyth’s articles are particularly revealing with regard to one facet of Schapiro as an iconographer. Schapiro never published the last chapter of his thesis on the sculpture of Moissac, the one that dealt with the iconographical sources of the sculptures. Forsyth’s article on the portal at Moissac began as a master’s essay for Schapiro in 1955. As she sets the stage for

providing evidence for a new and rather brilliant understanding of the sculptures of the portal and trumeau, she builds on Schapiro’s observations, but also notes the elements that he overlooked or left unqueried, such as the prominent swollen udders of the lioness on the trumeau (Fig. 11.1) or the falling idols of Heliopolis during the Flight into Egypt. She notes that Schapiro added to his reading of the sculptures in the classroom - for example, by noting the antithetical symmetry of the bed of the Virgin receiving the Magi and the bed of the dying Lazarus - without searching for further meaning. She points out his fascination with “iconographic realism” and secular imagery, but is baffled by his curious indifference to the monastic context of Moissac. She makes a fine case for identifying Lazarus’s wife with Jezebel and Luxuria; she then parallels the fall of Jezebel with the fallen idols of Heliopolis, develops new levels of meaning, and presents a contextual dating c. 1100-1115. One of the few times Schapiro went very far astray was in his article “From Mozarabic to Romanesque in Silos,” where, in a comparison of manuscript illumination with sculpture (which is a dubious point of departure), he attributed a change in style to indigenous artists at Silos who were reacting to changing social and economic conditions in the church and secular world. Both this article and the one on Souillac were published in 1939. Schapiro was thirty-five years old and deeply fascinated with Marxism and Freud, and these ideologies left traces in both articles. It took over sixty years and one of the world’s finest historians of Mozarabic and Romanesque Spain to set matters straight. In a superb study, John Williams takes Schapiro’s article to task with extraordinary perception, analyzing it point by point.His careful examination explains how the monks at Silos had written their own erroneous and chauvinistic history of the abbey, a history on which Schapiro had based his assumptions and Marxist reading. He then carefully itemizes the hypothetical slant, lapses in reasoning, ambiguities of language, and unsupported assertions with which Meyer Schapiro manipulates the reader

rather than demonstrating a proposition. As John Williams notes, Meyer Schapiro “overturns” his own thesis twenty-five years later, but only in a footnote, in the early pages of the Parma Ildefonsus (1964): “the coexistence of the Mozarabic and Romanesque in Spain... is a matter of an old native style surviving for one or two generations beside a newly introduced foreign style.”- Reading the two articles back to back is a cogent lesson in critical thought.

Figure 1L1 Detail of the trumeau at Moissac showing prominent swollen udders of the lioness. Moissac, Abbaye Saint Pierre. Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane.

Schapiro often left articles aging in the barrel for decades, and it is possible that the article-made-into-a-book on the Parma Ildefonsus was begun in the 1930s, as it shares the same captivation with the confrontation of two dissimilar styles, and toys mischievously with iconographical aspects, such as the sexual Freudian interpretation of an open door. The open door at Silos occurs above the image of the Doubting Thomas,- while in the Parma Ildefonsus it occurs in the image of the appearance of the Virgin to Ildefonsus in a church. Schapiro, in one of his famously long footnotes (note 27), acknowledges that the scene represents the vision of Ildefonsus, and then develops the possibility of a Freudian interpretation of the open door. Walter Cahn justly questioned the sexual interpretation in his review of the book, emphasizing that the open door of the church is described in the account of the vision of Ildefonsus.- In the chapter on the German artist in the manuscript,— Schapiro briefly lists over a dozen iconographic and compositional details that are found in Ottoman manuscripts, giving copious and pertinent references, but no illustrations, leaving the visual quest to the reader. During World War II and in the decade that followed, Schapiro struck a new path and concentrated on a series of iconographical questions. His formal preoccupations seem to fade into the background as he hones in on the texts that inspire the artist. Many of these articles are relatively brief, nearly all are masterful, and some are of fundamental importance for historians of the Middle Ages in all fields. His study on “The Religious Meaning of the Ruthwell Cross,”— one of five iconographic essays that appeared in rapid succession between 1942 and 1945, is illustrative of the type of problem that attracted him - an isolated, early medieval object or iconography based partly on unusual nonbiblical or para-biblical texts. What is the meaning the artist is trying to impart with an original composition, and can we retrieve it? Schapiro’s article on the Ruthwell Cross appeared at the same time as that of Fritz Saxl,

with whom he corresponded at the time.— The two articles arrive at some similar observations, but could not be more different. Saxl is traditional, giving an introduction to some of the past research and a fairly full description of the cross, followed by an analysis of the iconography, especially the figure of Christ; he then provides a comparison with the Bewcastle Cross and Mediterranean models, and a discussion of the problem of dating, all in an additive development. Typically, Schapiro begins his article as a response to another scholar’s work - namely, the fifth volume of G. Baldwin Brown’s The Arts of Early England (1921), devoted to the Bewcastle and Ruthwell crosses. He immediately cuts to the chaff, the image of Christ standing on the animals, and questions the traditional identification of a “Christ triumphant.” The animals under Christ’s feet are adoring him, not trampled, and the inscription surrounding the panel speaks of the beasts recognizing Christ, cognoverunt. He underscores the unusual, non-narrative grouping of scenes that surround it: Saints Paul and Anthony, Mary Magdalen at the feet of Christ, the Flight into Egypt, the Annunciation and Visitation, the Healing of the blind man, and the Crucifixion in the lowest panel. These have nothing to do with death or the extract from the Dream of the Rood, written in runes on the cross. He then retraces other biblical and apocryphal texts where animals recognize Christ, and the rare representations of Christ surrounded by beasts when he withdraws to the desert, an iconography that preceded the trampling versions of the post­ fourth-century Church triumphant, which refer to Psalm 90/91. Schapiro then relates the desert and eremitical elements in the Christ panel to the panels of John the Baptist and the hermit saints Paul and Anthony breaking bread, notes the importance of Paul as first hermit in Anglo-Saxon calendars and martyrologies, and the modelling of Anglo-Saxon saints lives on the lives of Egyptian saints and the desert fathers, the Celtic use of the Egyptian calculation of Easter, Cuthbert and Guthlac’s power over beasts, Mary Magdalen’s thirty-year desert life recorded in the Anglo-

Saxon martyrology, and so on. In short, with poetic energy and almost visionary meditation, Schapiro draws us back into the monastic seventh century and makes the integrated religious meaning of the scenes on the cross shine forth in their simple complexity: the spiritual withdrawal into the desert, the world of harmony with animals, and the recognition of the equitable judge and savior. Curiously, he emphasizes only the desert references as a unifying spiritual theme of the panels, overlooking the importance of the equally pervasive theme of recognition, not only in the panels of Christ, the Baptist, Annunciation, Healing of the blind man, the hermits Paul and Anthony, and Mary Magdalen anointing Christ but also in the Visitation,— where Elizabeth “recognizes” that Mary is blessed, and of course in the Dream of the Rood inscription, where the Cross “recognizes” Christ. Finally he places the cross and its southern stylistic elements within the tensions of the political and religious context of the synod of Whitby and the Romanization of Anglo-Saxon England. He glosses on its exocentric placement in Ruthwell on the Thwaite Burn and the intentions of its institutional authors, and then evokes parallels with the Life of Saint Kertigern, apostle of Strathclyde, who is obeyed by animals and restores the sight of a blind king. He closes with the lapidary sentence “The Cross is Anglian and classic in its forms, mainly Celtic in its religious content.” The unveiled religious meaning brings to the fore yet another latent aspect of the cross - namely, the formal expressiveness of the assembly and arrangement of scenes in a very badly damaged masterpiece, themes of recognition, of spiritual withdrawal and seeing that unite the two sides of the cross and explain the ordering of the seemingly isolated narrative and nonnarrative scenes. In the article, Schapiro has turned the intellectual tables. From being an evangelist of the formal reading, he has shown his intuition and vision as a meditative apostle of the power of the word, text, and historical setting. Playing as ever on several

keyboards at once, it is during this moment of intense inquiry into the liturgy, commentary, biography, and history of the first half of the Middle Ages that he writes his essay on the esthetic attitude in Romanesque art (1947).— The 1940s were a decade in which he was ardently pursuing the question of how messages are made and received in the pre-Gothic era, incidentally showing students how to search for and interpret significant texts and images. During the same year as the article on the Ruthwell Cross, 1945, he published his brief seminal article on the Merode Altarpiece, datable around 1425-1428, where Joseph the carpenter makes mousetraps to snare the devil at the moment of the Annunciation.— The article had many repercussions in the following decades. Schapiro’s textual and contextual arguments were universally accepted, and scholars would provide symbolic explanations for other objects, notably the trimming ax, saw, and rod, which reflect the words of Isaiah 10:15.— What has often been lost in later discussions is the import of Schapiro’s remarks on what this altarpiece tells us about a new relationship, if not tension, that is created between the religious message and the secular setting with the advent of northern Renaissance realism. He notes how domestic objects psychologically evoke a dichotomy of the masculine versus feminine in apparel, tools, and belongings; mice, chimneys, and open doors and windows call to mind sexual allusions; the basin and towel are metaphors for chastity and cleanliness in daily bourgeois life, and at the same time these objects transmit age-old theological and patristic symbolism: Religious thought tries to appropriate all this for itself; it seeks to stamp the freshly discovered world with its own categories, to spiritualize it and incorporate it within a scheme of other-worldly value... But in shaping a semblance of the real world about a religious theme of the utmost mysteriousness, like the Incarnation, the objects of the setting become significant of the unacknowledged physical realities that the religion aims to transcend... In accepting the realistic vision of nature, religious art runs the risk of receding to a marginal position, of becoming in turn the border element that secular reality had been... a

secret language in the small objects.—

The language of the small objects also belongs to verbal expressions, bourgeois expressions of sexuality and purity that echo back and forth through the triptych, expressions that have now been gathered by Rose Bidler in her Dictionnaire érotique.— In the following reading of the trip-tych, common sexual allusions are in italics. On the left-hand panel, in the mundane world, the young clean-faced patron wears a virile dague à couillettes, his wife clutches a string of coral beads which promises to protect infants, a horse and rider (chevaucher) is seen through the open door in the garden wall, a terrestrial foppish town messenger, perhaps Bel Accueil, announces the couple’s arrival, and a flowering rosebush (Roman de la Rose) peaks out behind the door to the house. The angel Gabriel passes through a door that has been locked with a key from the inside! But the door is visible only in the left-hand panel. The Virgin in her piety sits humbly on the footrest of the bench, reading the Bible. A liturgical book with frequent rubrics and a prayer roll are on the table. The Christ Child passes through a closed windowpane on rays of light, while on the back wall the open windows give only onto the sky and celestial clouds. The chimney is cold, not in use. The candle on the male side of the chimney has been removed. The flame of the candle on the table has been extinguished. The basin and towel symbolize purification, much like the lily in the maiolica pitcher. On the right-hand panel, the windows of the narrow rustic workshop give onto a cityscape, where couples walk toward the church, protected from the devil by the mousetrap set on a shelf outside the window of the atelier; the battens for the windows, like the door to the house, are full of nails (newly driven nails on the door, rusty old nails on the battens), evoking the expression river le clou, but there are virtually no nails in the immaculate central panel; the scattered nails on Joseph’s table evoke “compter les doux,” to wait patiently; a trimming ax stamped with the three

circles of the “scutum fidei,” a saw stamped with a cross, and a wooden rod at the feet of Joseph ask, “do we rise up against or glorify ourselves over him who uses us” - in other words, these are the tools of Joseph the carpenter or even perhaps the tools of God;— and the aged, bearded, and chaste Joseph now only bores holes with a vilebrequin in a wooden board to make bait-traps for the devil. The characterization of each of the panels is simple, easily readable, hierarchical, colloquial, and intimate.— Another short article on the Joseph scenes on the episcopal chair of Maximianus in Ravenna distils the architectural beauty of Schapiro’s woven thought and his search for universals in the particular.— The details of the iconography seem nearly absent in the article; neither the number of scenes, nor their content, nor their placement on the throne is mentioned. Basic knowledge about the chair is assumed for anyone who would want to read the article. What interests him is why such an extensive cycle occurs on a sixth-century archbishop’s throne. He hones in on the texts closest to the context: the Ravennate tituli of Helpidius Rusticus (early sixth century) and sermons of the Ravennate bishop Peter Chrysologus (fifth century) which liken Joseph to Christ; the sermons of the Milanese bishop Ambrose who likens Joseph to a bishop; the laws of Justinian which assigned important civic duties to the bishop. He then sketches the religious and secular activities of Maximianus. At last he arrives at the layered meaning of the crown worn by Joseph, the modius or modiolus, which is not only a bushel crown worn by personifications of Greek cities, insuring fertility and good fortune, but also a crown of the Byzantine emperor. Binding together the iconography, texts, and context, the article closes with a very elegant and concise philosophical description of analogical interpretation, as it existed in the Christian world before the advent of realism: Since formal and final causes, to use Aristotelian language, were the chief ones, and the material and efficient causes were more and more neglected, analogy and purpose became the key concepts in explaining

the world. A similarity of form, even a purely verbal one in the names of things, was already a bond between things. Necessity was manifested in the formal resemblances of persons, objects, and events. These equivalences, which are the ground of symbolism, are not self-evident, given directly to the eye or the mind, but, like poetic symbols, are discovered through directing concepts and requirements which change with the human situation. The discovered analogies in turn serve a hidden purpose of the divine being. Every event or stage is an announcement and a preparation of the subsequent stage. Just as the plant is latent in the seed, so Christ’s life is latent in Joseph’s, and the secular authority of the bishop is already intended in Joseph’s career. Symbolism thus includes purpose as well as analogy; the universe nature and history - is saturated with Christian finality, everything points beyond itself to a formal system evident in the analogical structure of things, due to a divine intention working itself out in time. The predominance of analogy and purposefulness in much of mediaeval thinking is a primitive trait which we find among savage peoples and also in children and psychotics. But the mediaeval practice differs from the primitive in one important respect. The Middle Ages inherited the Greek and Roman rationality, deductive spirit and encyclopedism, the search for completeness and order of knowledge and applied these to the religious sphere with concepts largely restricted to the formal and teleological. Hence the play of analogy in Christian thought, while seemingly poetic and unconstrained, has a systematic, constructive character.—

The search for visual elements with which to create a logical argument for dating and placing was one of Schapiro’s constant preoccupations, and his imagination was ignited by the discovery of the frescoes at Castelseprio in 1944. His writings on the frescoes are threefold and include a short book review of the monograph by G. P. Bognetti and A. de Capitani d’Arzago (1950), a long review of K. Weitzmann’s monograph (1952), and a note in response to an article written by A. Grabar (1957).— For Schapiro, the frescoes presented the problem of dating a work that comes to light in an artistic vacuum, a period in which sufficient quantities of comparative material have not survived. Were the frescoes

seventh-century, as the Italians argued, or tenth-century and painted by an artist from Constantinople in the middle Byzantine period, as Kurt Weitzmann argued? Schapiro takes up Weitzmann’s arguments on style and iconography one by one, examining details of figures, motifs, arrangement, costume, and gesture over the whole range of time, from late antiquity to the tenth century and throughout the Mediterranean regions, constantly asking whether the artist is Greek or Lombard, if his brushstroke, command of perspective, and rendering of architecture, light, and shade are in continuity with the late antique past, or part of a Byzantine Renaissance reprise, as in such works as the Joshua Roll and Paris Psalter. He brings up and develops a wide spectrum of visual problems that bear on his subject - for example, the coexistence of narrative and iconic modes, the nature of copying and its effect on the resulting art, the origins of the art of the Carolingian period, how these northern artists were trained and by whom, and what models they were using. He points out the essential weaknesses of Weitzmann’s study: an oriented view and the omission of comparisons stemming from an earlier period that are uncomfortable to the argument. Schapiro canvases this earlier period as thoroughly as possible, including both extant works of art and ancient verbal descriptions and drawings of lost works. While some details in the cycle at Castelseprio are isolated, such as the Parthian crowns of the magi, for which Schapiro can find only third-century comparisons, he otherwise marshals a number of highly pertinent seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-century comparisons, placing Castelseprio in a position of precursor to the Carolingian Renaissance. In his search for datable details, he finally draws attention to two motifs that occur only from the eighth century onward, the cross-nimbus with linear nail-head light rays and the clavis on the thigh. In the end, Schapiro’s meticulous approach and late eighth-century dating - between the two temporal extremes have been twice vindicated: first by the discovery of a sinopia for the Flight into Egypt in the mid-eighth-century church of San

Salvatore in Brescia, and second by recent radiocarbon dating of the timbers (778-952) and thermoluminescent dating of the roof tiles (c. 826) of Castelseprio. The article published in 1960 on manuscript Glazier 25, a Psalter that had recently been acquired by the Pierpont Morgan Library,— is one of the few archaeological studies where Schapiro ventures into the thirteenth century. He recognizes and announces from the outset that the pictures preceding the Psalter are “interesting for their political meaning.” There follows a trenchant description of the iconography: first he names each of the scenes, then compares the cycle with the Amesbury Psalter and Westminster Psalter, notes the singularity of the initials, characterizes the powerful binary pairing of the six facing scenes of the cycle as “episode” versus “scene of majesty,” and at last comes to bear on the scenes of David, where an unexpected compositional comparison is drawn between the scene of Saul in bed and David playing the harp and the Benedictional of Ethelwold. He notes the quiet composure of the demented Saul, the unparalleled iconography of Saul in bed (repeated in the Beatus initial, where Saul is not crowned), illustrating I Sam. 16, 23 rather than the traditional verses of violence in Chapters 18 and 19. Schapiro then summarizes the importance of anointing in the English coronation ordo, its frequent representation in images, its absence in the Glazier Psalter, and the assertive posture of the king’s crossed legs. He explains how, early in the reign of Henry III (1216-1272), Innocent III “affirmed the dissimilarity of the anointed king to the anointed Christ” and the primacy of the Church, noting also that Saint Peter and Saint Silvester (the first popes) both receive double invocations in the litany. He also notes the close resemblance between the miniatures of Christ in Majesty in the Glazier and Westminster Psalters. Finally, stylistic comparisons lead to a dating in the 1220s. Every possible line of inquiry seems to have been explored, all data marshalled to the cause. Except one! What has been overlooked is the fact that Henry III was crowned twice,

first at the age of nine at Gloucester in 1216 in the midst of the Barons’ War, and again with papal permission at Westminster on May 17, 1220.— There was a great and costly celebration, for the second crowning was intended to reaffirm the authority of Henry, now thirteen years old. He had recently been referred to as “not a king but a boy” and the regent Hubert de Burgh had been unable to bring the barons to heel and replenish the exchequer. The day after the coronation, the barons swore to renounce their title to royal castles at the king’s will and to pay their taxes. Within this context, the miniatures of the David and Saul and the crowning of an assertive king take on increased political meaning. With regard to the composition in the Benedictional of Ethelwold, the scene is reversed. David is seated on the left side, the more sacred side of the picture, where he is designated as Saul’s successor by the angel of the Lord, while Saul, attended by a woman who lays her hands on his shoulders, is in bed on the right side, the more negative side. The artist appears to be drawing a parallel between the Davidic episode and the gentle Henry III playing the harp for his father, John, a king shown here in bed with a woman standing close and touching him, a king who was known for his libertinism during his first marriage and for having often stayed in bed until noon with his second wife, Isabelle d’Angouleme. The parallelism continues on the facing page. David was twice anointed and Henry is twice crowned. The weight of the word coronatus becomes even more layered than Schapiro has already demonstrated. The iconographic elements in the initials at Psalms 38, 52, and 101 also take on significance when seen through the eyes of the young king Henry: the fable of the stork and the fox at the head of a psalm begging for wisdom in speech; monkeys frolicking in the initial of the psalm condemning fools who renounce God and do iniquity; and finally three men exhorting God to hear their prayer, to raise them up over their enemies, to free the oppressed and prisoners. Finally, the intriguing relationship of the miniatures with the Benedictional of Ethelwold and the Westminster Psalter becomes

clear when one realizes that Pierre de Roches, bishop of Winchester, was the tutor of Henry III and may have made the Benedictional available to the artist, just as Guillaume de Humez, abbot of Westminster, must have shown him the Psalter.— The book Words, Script and Pictures: Semiotics of Visual Language appeared in 1996, the year Schapiro died.— The book’s relatively short essays, Schapiro’s Vier letzte Lieder, express in overarching volleys his understanding of the habits of representation and the complex lives of meaningful signs in medieval art. As he reads each picture, he himself is an artist/reader looking for the artist/reader of the picture. It is the artist/reader who conceives the image and first receives it. As each picture has its own, often variable means and meaning, generalizations flee to the woods. With the meticulousness of the medieval accessus, he parses the picture grammatically, rhetorically, materially, for its intention, use, artifex (artist), finality, role, aspect, furnishings, and for its limits. In the first part of the book, “Words and Pictures,” he is constantly posing voiced or implied questions: what is the smallest number of elements necessary for an image to be identifiable; and by extension, identifiable by whom and when and under what conditions; which elements are provided by the text and which by the artist and why; why do images change over time in the face of an unchanged text; how does the artist capture the literal sense by comparison to the metaphorical or symbolic sense; what means of expression are available to the artist at a given moment; which are unknown to him; which are spontaneous and which are learnt; what are the modes and norms of the stylistic context and how do they affect the choice of elements and their expressive force; what effect has naturalism on the rendering of typological or metaphorical interpretations; are the preoccupations of the theologians the same as those of the artist; what are the different possible readings, ancient and modern, of a complex symbolic ensemble? In the second part, “Script in Pictures,” he brings up what the

Renaissance viewed as the “invasive” role of writing in pictures, showing how across history and into the art of our time words and speech and their vehicles, whether in the air, on a roll, on a codex, or on other supports, create dramatic, expressive, signifying relations through their orientation, legibility, and materiality. The core of the chapter is a stroke of genius, a refreshed reading of a familiar stranger, the evangelist portrait in the Gospels and its relation to the logos, the epicenter of the Christian religion. It prickles with acute sensibility toward the different ways the medieval artist integrates into the miniature the image of written words destined for the spectator.— Schapiro was intrinsically fascinated by the gifted, original artist, how he creates, how he reads, how he sees, what inspires him to choose an iconography and craft its form. The intricate threading of Schapiro’s thought makes a pirouette in an interview he gave in 1994 at the age of ninety.— The last paragraph reads, “I’m not an admirer of Warhol’s work,” Schapiro told me goodnaturedly. “He was a man who worked very much in the spirit of advertising.” Then, crossing realms with his usual aplomb, he summed up Pop Art, if not civilization itself, in recondite terms. “Do you know the work of the 18th-century British poet, Edward Young? He once said that we’re born originals and die copies.”

The last sentence is a show-stopper. How did Schapiro know this eighteenth-century poet-clergyman (1683-1765)? The most likely reason is that while preparing his dissertation, he visited Angouleme to study the Romanesque façade of the cathedral. Here, he would also have visited the museum and fallen upon its most arresting work, a somber and imposing nocturnal painting, almost 8 feet high (238 x 192 cm), of Edward Young carrying a shovel and the spotlit stiffened corpse of his stepdaughter, Elizabeth Temple, who, in 1736, died in Lyon on her way to Nice (Fig. 11.2). She was refused burial in the Catholic cemetery because she was a Protestant,

Figure 1L2 Edward Young carrying the corpse of his stepdaughter, Elizabeth Temple, by Pierre Antoine Auguste Vafflard. Oil, 238 x 192 cm, c. 1804, Le Musée d’Angoulême. Image courtesy of Le Musée d’Angoulême, Thiery Bias.

and Young had to bury her in the cemetery of the Swiss colony located in the Hôtel Dieu.— It is doubtful that the museum in Angouleme provided any information about the painter, Pierre Antoine Auguste Vafflard. Vafflard exhibited the work in the salon of 1804, where he provided a handbill with the explanation “Young tenant sa fille morte sur ses bras s’écrit dans sa douleur amère: O

zèle barbare et haï d’un dieu bienfaisant; ces hommes impitoyables ont refusé de répandre de la poussière sur une poussière.”— The citation is from Young’s most famous poem, Night Thoughts, which was translated by Pierre Letourneur in 1769 and became the rage of the Romantic school in France, reprinted in fifty editions. Returning to Columbia University and its library, Schapiro would have found the poem Night Thoughts, the source of inspiration for Vafflard, as well as biographies of Young, and Martin William Steinke’s 1917 edition of Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition in a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison, published in 1759.— Conjectures, which is the source of Schapiro’s quotation, is threaded with aphorisms about artistic genius: “Learning is borrowed knowledge, genius is knowledge innate.” “Rules, like crutches, are a needful aid to the lame, although an impediment to the strong.” “Born originals, how comes it to pass that we die copies? That meddling ape imitation, as soon as we come to years of indiscretion (so let me speak), snatches the pen and blots out nature’s mark of separation, cancels her kind intention, destroys all mental individuality.”— On the contrary, Meyer Schapiro was an original.

Notes 1 Meyer Schapiro gave all his papers to Columbia University. They are housed in the Rare Book Library and a detailed inventory is available on the web. 2 The article entitled “Style” was reprinted in 1994 in the fourth volume of his collected works: The Theory and Philosophy ofArt see note 4 ahead. 3 Meyer Schapiro’s work has been the subject of several colloquia, articles, books, and encyclopedia articles, which can be found through JSTOR, Regesta Imperii, and Kubikat. Volume 45 of the periodical Social

Research, published in 1978, shortly after Schapiro’s full retirement, contains many highly perceptive articles by eminent students and colleagues. Schapiro’s wife compiled his bibliography; see L. Milgrim, Meyer Schapiro: The Bibliography (New York, 1995). Other works have appeared posthumously. 4 Romanesque Art (New York, 1977); Modern Art (New York, 1978); Late Antique, Early Christian and Medieval Art (New York, 1979); The Theory and Philosophy of Art (New York, 1994); Worldview in Painting - Art and Society (New York, 1999), all published by George Braziller. 5 Plummer, in Social Research, 45 (1978), 164-75, and Forsyth “Narrative at Moissac: Schapiro’s Legacy,” Gesta, 41, 2002, 71-93; “Word Play in the Cloister at Moissac,” in Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 2008), 154-78. 6 J. Williams, “Meyer Schapiro in Silos: Pursuing an Iconography of Style,” The Art Bulletin, 85 (2003), 442-68. See also O.K. Werckmeister, review of Meyer Schapiro, Romanesque Art, in Art Quarterly, n.s. 2 (1979), 21118. 7 Williams (as in note 6), 464, and Schapiro, The Parma Ildefonsus: A Romanesque Illuminated Manuscript from Cluny and Related Works (New York, 1964), 3, note 5. In the introduction to his collected volume Romanesque Art (as in note 4) Schapiro appears conscious but unrepentant

of his errors:

“I’m aware

of many imperfections,

inconsistencies, and unclear formulations in those papers, but to correct them would require more rewriting than I can undertake now”; ix. 8 Williams (as in note 6), 452, and note 119. 9 W. Cahn, review of Parma Ildefonsus, Art Bulletin, 50 (1967), 72-75, esp. 75; the review is also noted by Williams (as in note 6), 468, note 176, 10 Carl Nordenfalk, who was the first to discuss the concurring styles in the Parma Ildefonsus, identified the German artist as Albertus of Trier, a scribe illuminator recorded in documents at Cluny: C. Nordenfalk, “Miniature ottonienne et ateliers capétiens,” Art de France, IV (1964), 44-

59. 11 Schapiro, Late Antique and Early Christian (as in note 4), 150-95. 12 “The Ruthwell Cross,” JWCI, 7, 1943, 1-19. Fritz Saxl quotes a helpful letter from Schapiro in note 4, and their correspondence, 1940-1946, can be found in the Meyer Schapiro collection, Columbia University, Series II, box 165, folder 4. 13 Schapiro (as in note 12), 164. 14 The essay was reprinted as the lead article in the first volume of his selected papers: Romanesque Art (as in note 4). 15 “Muscipula Diaboli, The Symbolism of the Mérode Altarpiece,” in Late Antique, Early Christian and Mediaeval Art (as in note 4), 1-11. Johan Huizinga had identified the mousetrap as a trap for the devil and cited Peter Lombard’s Sentences in the 1935 Dutch edition of his book, The Waning of the Middle Ages; see E. Peters and W. Simons, “The New Huizinga and the Old Middle Ages,” Speculum, v. 74 (1999), 616. 16 See C. Minott, “The Theme of the Merode Tryptych,” Art Bulletin 51 (1969), 267-71. This work has been reproduced on countless occasions and is widely available online, as for example on the website of the Metropolitan

Museum

of

Art

at

http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collectiononline/search/470304. 17 Schapiro, Muscipula Diaboli (as in note 15), 9-10. 18 R. Bidler, Dictionnaire érotique, ancien français, moyen français, renaissance (Montréal, 2002). See also G. di Stefano, Dictionnaire des locutions en moyen français (Montréal, 1991). 19 The patron of the altarpiece, Peter Ymbrechts, married a woman named Schrijnmakere or “cabinet maker” between 1425 and 1428. 20 For a similar example of layered reading, in this case a pictorial love story, first published in Art de l’enluminure, n° 5, in 2003 that turns out to be that of a prostitute, based on the poems of François Villon, see Das Buch der Liebenden: Histoire d’amour sans paroles. Ms. 388 du Musée

Condé à Chantilly, commentary by P. Stirnemann and M. Zink to the facsimile (Simbach am Inn, 2005), 11-34 and 47-67. 21 “The Joseph scenes on the Maximianus throne in Ravenna” (1952), in Late Antique, Early Christian and Mediaeval Art, New York (as in note 4), 34-47. 22 Schapiro, “The Joseph Scenes on the Maximianus Throne in Ravenna” (as in note 21), 42-43. 23 A current website for Castelseprio lists over 550 articles and books that have appeared. 24 “An Illuminated English Psalter of the Early Thirteenth Century” (1960) in Late Antique (as in note 4), 329-54. This is G. 25 and like the Merode Altarpiece, it too has been widely reproduced and images are available online;

see

the

Morgan

Library

online

catalogue

at

http://corsair.themorgan.org. 25 D. Carpenter, The Minority of Henry III (Los Angeles, 1990), 187 passim. 26 Benedictional of Aethelwold, London, BL, Add. 49598; Westminster Psalter, London, BL, Royal 2. A. XXII. 27 The first part of the book was initially published in M. Schapiro, Words and Pictures: On the Literal and Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text (The Hague, 1973). 28 This paragraph is taken in part from my review of the French edition (Macula) in the Bulletin du bibliophile (2002), n° 2, 373-76. 29 D. Solomon, “A Critic Turns 90: Meyer Schapiro,” The New York Times Magazine, August 14 (1994), 22-25. 30 Young paid 729 livres and 12 sols for the burial. A. Péricaud, Notes et documents pour servir à ¡’histoire de Lyon, sous le règne de Henri III, 1574-1589, vol. I (Lyon, 1843), 64, note 1. 31 “For oh! the cursed ungodliness of zeal! While sinful flesh relented, spirit nursed/In blind infallibility’s embrace,/The sainted spirit petrified the breast;/Denied the charity of dust, to spread/O’er dust!” (11. 165-69).

32 Samuel Richardson is the author of the epistolary novel Sir Charles Grandison, 1753. The Steinke (1886-1971) edition is the elegant, incisive, and highly synthetic doctoral thesis (1914, University of Illinois); it traces the English sources and German precedents and reception of Conjectures, and judges the work to be conventional, elevated in style, if somewhat inflated, and not as original as the author claims. 33 Edith J. Morely, Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition, London,

1918,

p.

14,

17,

20

https://archive.org/details/cu31924013204155).

(available

on-line

at

12

Michael Camille's Queer Middle Ages Matthew M. Reeve

Introduction Michael Camille (1958-2002) is the most recent iconographer covered in this volume (Plate 1). Born in Keighley, Yorkshire (England), in 1958, his undergraduate and postgraduate training was undertaken at the University of Cambridge, and he spent the entirety of his subsequent academic career at the University of Chicago.1 Considered the “enfant terrible”- of medievalist art history, his published work amounts to one of the most powerful and sustained critiques of traditional iconography published during the later twentieth century. His early work in particular, stretching between the mid 1980s through the mid 1990s, was focused to a large extent on the problematics of iconography itself. In a celebrated series of essays and monographs, Camille sought to dismantle the authority of iconography as an interpretative strategy that had dominated medievalist art history since the nineteenth century. His first book, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (1989), directly paraphrased and challenged Émile Male’s classic account of French high Gothic iconography, The Gothic Image (1899); his 1992 Image on the Edge:

The Margins of Medieval Art offered a social and cultural revision of the boundaries of medieval art - particularly the borders of the manuscript page and the carvings on the edges of buildings which for Camille served as metaphors for the margins of medieval life; a range of early essays, including his “Mouths and Meanings: Toward and Anti-Iconography of Medieval Art” (1993), takes on Erwin Panofsky’s iconographical work by exposing how certain works of medieval art short-circuit iconography as a mode of reading, thereby demanding different interpretative strategies for images that cannot be readily “decoded” by a Patristic text. Camille’s later work developed many of these interpretative strategies and employed them to explore and destabilize a range of key monuments, from the English Luttrell Psalter to the French Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry. Camille also published on Renaissance art, nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, and critical theory, and appeared in the media, including on NPR’s This American Life, where he, opposite Ira Glass, narrated the American medievalism of a mock dinner-tournament at Medieval Times, near Chicago.Like most of the figures covered in this volume, Camille’s work as an iconographer cannot easily be disentangled from his appraisal and promotion of the Middle Ages generally. Understood by many as an early proponent of the so-called New Art History in medieval art history, Camille substantially overturned an established vision for the Middle Ages in art history and beyond. For W.J.T. Mitchell, the Middle Ages prior to Camille’s interventions seemed “hopelessly orthodox and stuffy, dominated by religious dogma and the archaic conventions of aristocratic romances... unbearably pious and obsessed with higher, more spiritual things than we modern, secular humanists could bear to contemplate.”- Camille’s work reflected a self-conscious denial of the Platonic-scholastic vision of the Middle Ages embodied in Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, of the overtly theological and liturgical image of the Gothic cathedral as a

“mirror” of the medieval world advocated by Émile Mâle, and of the nationalistic and nostalgic “Merrie Old England” vision of the Middle Ages embodied in the work of his English predecessors John Harvey, Nickolaus Pevsner, John Betjman, and others.Camille explored what for many was a far more secular and pluralistic Middle Ages consistent with the ethical and moral sensibilities of “the literate Left” in England and North America.

Plate 1 Michael Camille. Image courtesy of Stuart Michaels.

Every period creates the Middle Ages it needs and deserves, and Camille’s Middle Ages was politically dissenting and antihegemonic, spiritually conflicted, physically and sexually plural, violent, and aesthetically glamorous. Grounded in recent poststructuralist theory and particularly Marxist and socialist critique, Camille’s subject was alterity (or the “marginal”) during the Middle Ages in its many forms. As such, his work explored aspects of medieval art that had been largely ignored or minimized by previous interpreters and by their icono-graphic methods. He understood that consistently looking at the center rather than the margins signified an implicit agreement with hegemonic practices

of making images in the Middle Ages and interpreting them within the terms established by religious and academic orthodoxy. His study of manuscript margins exposed iconography that denied the heteronormative canon of medievalist iconography by being bawdy, and occasionally homoerotic and or scatological in nature; or he applied new theoretical models borrowed from sociology and queer theory to explore canonical works (the Très Riches Heures, Bourges Cathedral) and exposed the social and sexual structures that informed them. Camille’s work offered a vision of the Middle Ages that was queer in its fullest theoretical sense: to paraphrase David Halperin, it was “at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant,” and it functioned in Cheryl Smith’s terms as “A strategy, an attitude... a radical questioning of social and cultural norms. Before turning to explore Camille’s life and work in greater depth, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider his legacy. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto in the 1990s and a graduate student at Cambridge (until 2002), Michael Camille dominated my thought as a young person struggling to become a medievalist. His presence was still felt at Cambridge, both in the institutional memory of the department and in the physical signs Camille left behind (i.e., the many marginal doodles in books in the university library that I chanced upon as I read the same volumes decades later). Like many of my generation, I came to consider him to be a major influence upon my work, one of my own intellectual household gods. He offered a voice from the margins capable of being understood and embraced by a range of alternate modern subjectivities at the time, whether sexual, religious, ethnic, or otherwise, that also felt disenfranchised by the social and intellectual apparatus of medievalist art history and wanted to shatter the glass through which we gazed upon the period. And yet, unlike many of my friends trained contemporaneously in North America, I never met him. Camille’s untimely death in 2002 meant that my own association with him remained an imagined one. Assessing his legacy as a medievalist

and iconographer is done principally on the basis of his writings. Although conference sessions have been held in his honor, they remain unpublished.- His personal papers at the University of Chicago are not fully catalogued and have not been carefully studied.- Unlike some other iconographers included here, we are still living through a period in which Camille’s writings and influence are shaping our discipline. Camille’s life and work are worthy of a more extended account than can be offered here; I can only hope that the present essay offers some directions for further research.

Origins Michael Camille was born in West Yorkshire to working-class parents. His father was from the Seychelles and of mixed race and his mother was Irish. Unconventional in its very makeup, the Camille family was radically and esoterically left-wing: Labour supporters, enthusiastic nudists, and antimonarchists (Michael’s father apparently threw his shoes at the television when “the Royals” appeared). As children, Michael and his sister, Michelle, were raised part-time by their grandparents as their parents struggled to support them. Superficially at least, there is little in Camille’s early life that led him to either medieval studies specifically or to academia generally. His father was apparently illiterate and the household on the council estate that he grew up in was devoid of books. Camille was the first child from his grammar school (Oakbank School in Keighley, Yorkshire) to “make it” to Oxbridge (the social significance of this transgression of class boundaries will still be more keenly understood by British rather than North American readers). He began by reading English in Part I of his undergraduate degree, which introduced him to a range of literary and social theorists that he would grapple with

through his career, including Norman Bryson. In Part II he read history of art under George Henderson and Jean-Michel Massing, and continued to his graduate studies alongside Paul Binski and Philip Lindley, two figures who would be leading medievalists. In putting Camille’s writings into context, I want to focus on two features from his early life and university education that emerge as key influences on his later formation as a scholar and writer: his sexual subjectivity and his political orientations. As Madeline Caviness put it, Camille was always “out,” although little attention has been paid to his sexual and social development and to the specific ways these may have oriented his research.- Until pubescence, Camille’s sexual identity was transsexual, a word he certainly neither knew nor used in the period. One of his earliest creative experiments with sexual images was the result of his discovery of his father’s collection of glossy soft-core pornographic magazines (which may well have been given to him by his father). With a male friend with whom Camille had a romantic friendship, he dissected and eviscerated them (two words he would often use in his scholarship) and re­ formed them into “The Nipple Erection Joke Books” (complete with annotations), which he kept until the end of his life. While there is much that seems like silly, schoolboy foolery in this, here, surely, is an early example of an approach to the hegemonic authority of the image (in this case heterosexually oriented male pornography and the encoded relationship with a seemingly dominant male gaze). The literal fragmentation of the text, of the power structure, and of the text as power structure, and the exposure of its underlying ideological conditions (and those excluded by them) suggest a nascent approach to images that would remain with Camille and would color his approach to the medieval image. As Camille described it in 1994, his early imagistic sexuality was formed principally from the images in the books he signed out of his local library. Each Saturday he could sign out up to six “large

glossy art books” - monographs on Michelangelo and studies of St. Sebastian - which “allowed him to escape into a private world.” The context of this quotation is undoubtedly Camille’s most confessional account of his own sexual-aesthetic position, which did not appear in his writings on medieval art, but in “The Abject Gaze and the Homosexual Body: Flandrin’s Figure d’Etude,” published in Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History (1994). Camille notes in particular Brandt Aymar’s The Young Male Figure in Paintings, Sculptures, and Drawings from Ancient Egypt to the Present, in which he could “check out” Flandrin’s nude, among other naked classicizing bodies. Writing years later, Camille would lament, I am struck by the irony of presenting naked bodies veiled by “art” - and by the fore-word, in which the author states that he has excluded discussion of the church art of the Middle Ages because then the figures were “so full draped and grotesquely figured that they lost their esthetic appeal.” My eventually becoming a specialist in medieval art might well have involved an unconscious rejection of those countless longed-for but unattainable neo-classical “art-book” bodies.—

Camille was clear that publishing this piece - far outside the bounds of medieval studies - was deeply meaningful to him because it signified a reattachment of his sexual subjectivity to his aesthetic subjectivity.— Camille suggests that his own aesthetic orientation toward medieval art grew out of a process of de­ identification with antique-derived forms: “a process that constitutes the subject by partly detaching her or him from normative ideals, even manifestly homoerotic or homosexual ones and however deeply rooted in her or his own psychic topography and trajectory.”— Thus understood, Camille’s appraisal of the Middle Ages, the shifting of his erotic identifications from the visual cultures of the antique world to those of the Middle Ages, grew from an increasingly ambivalent view of the ideality of the male form in the antique tradition. For Camille, these images had become de-eroticized (intellectually, if not viscerally so) because,

via their many replications (enumerated by Camille in his essay), they had become little more than a “consumer fetish,” a signifier that signified a detached and commodified queerness rather than an actual sexual body or act.

Figure 12A Club advertisements. The Michael Camille Papers, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago Box 14, “Picturesque Gothic” file. Image courtesy of Matthew Reeve.

But this would seem to tell only half of the story. Insofar as sexual-aesthetic self-identification is concerned, the antique tradition of bodily representation - and its Renaissance iteration that Camille would become deeply engaged with at Cambridge through the teachings of Jean-Michel Massing and Paul Joannides - was too sanitized, too mimetically real, too canonically rooted (and therefore too safely enmeshed in the discourses that frequently denied its erotic potential) to allow him to explore the “kinkier” side of human sexuality via his art historical research.— Particularly in the margins of medieval books and buildings, Camille looked for and found sodomy, scatology, intergenerational sexuality, bestiality, and an approach to representation that was

prefiguratively “camp.”— Camille’s conception of the Middle Ages as “queer” may be understood to follow a tradition of English medievalism established by homoerotically inclined writers and collectors, such as Horace Walpole (1717-97), and continued by William Beckford and others, including Thomas Wright (a fellow historian of sexuality and of the grotesque) (d. 1877);— like Camille, these authors explored or projected sexual fantasy into a distant, medieval past, a displacement of the erotic imagination from a perceived conservative present to an imagined Middle Ages of erotic and libidinal possibility.— An inveterate collector of ephemera on the Middle Ages, Camille’s collection of nightclub advertisements and postcards indicates that he reveled ironically in modernity’s employment of the Middle Ages as a locus for alternate sexualities (Fig. 12.1). Camille’s work may be understood as an extension of a sexual-aesthetic tradition in medieval studies in which queer scholars found their sexual, moral, and ethical subjectivity to be “normalized” within a chaotic and “queer” Middle Ages. Unsurprisingly, he was deeply interested in the medievalist productions of both Horace Walpole and William Beckford, and his notes indicate that he explored genealogies of queer proponents and collectors of medieval art, from the Duke de Berry to Walpole, Beckford, and beyond.— What is arguably significant about this is that, in contrast to a tradition of modern art historical writing, Camille did not seek to consistently cleave his aesthetic judgment from his own erotic, emotive, and ethical judgment. On the contrary, Camille’s appraisal of the Middle Ages and the medieval object/image were framed by conscious and unconscious preoccupations in the present. Camille’s interest in the marginal and queer is one strand albeit a deeply subjective one of a broadly socialist agenda within much of his work. Although he appears to have been nonpartisan politically and had little interest in the actualities of contemporary party politics, Camille’s writing and research nevertheless reflect “a commitment to progressive social agendas concerning class and

race.”— As a student in the 1970s and 1980s, Camille was uniquely positioned to absorb the new socialist and Marxist art history being written at King’s College by John Barrell (The Dark Side of the Landscape, 1980), by T. J. Clark, of whom more will be said below, and by theorists of literature, such as Frederick Jameson, whose The Political Unconscious (1981) is cited on the opening page of The Gothic Idol. It is significant that Camille absorbed some of these ideas while a student at Peterhouse - famously the most conservative of Cambridge colleges - during the height of its Thatcherite hegemony, something which exacerbated the class dynamic in his later work.— Emblematic of this is Camille’s approach to the marginal imagery of the fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter: I cannot see the margins of the fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter as celebrations of country life and artistic freedom, but think of them rather as signs of feudal slavery and social control that dominated those who ploughed the page as well as the fields... the aesthetic... is to my mind, as tyrannous and tainted as any hegemonic practice.—

Overturning a long tradition that considered these images to be “charming” representations of a bucolic rural life (reread through the lens of nostalgic medievalism in the Anglia Perdita tradition), for Camille they become active tools in the ideology of feudalism, beautiful signs of social repression. Yet here, as in much of Camille’s work, his socialist agenda lacks notation, or a specific theoretical source. While manifestly informed by the neo-Marxist theory of his period, his work was never consistently tethered to a particular theoretical source or stream. Yet it would be a mistake - and a typically scholastic one - to locate and look for Camille’s socialist agenda strictly in his bibliography. Typical of authors of his period, Camille’s own socialist leanings were informed as much by elite culture as by popular culture. As we have seen, his university years coincided with the height of Thatcherite Britain (Falklands War, 1982;

miners’ strike, 1985); these years produced a significant wave of protest in art and popular music expressed by the punk and postpunk movements. Unsurprisingly, Camille was a fan of much of this music, and particularly the Smiths (1982-1988), who were vigorous and eloquent opponents of Thatcher. In the Smiths’ front man Morrissey, Camille found not only a remarkably articulate and beautiful man but also a queer, Northern, working-class hero whose music raged against the New Right of Margaret Thatcher and polite, middle-class monarchism (often elided in Morrissey’s commentary as “Thatcher and the royals”).— These countercultural statements, while socialist in orientation if not in word, embody a particular brand of “soft socialism” that was at least as influential on Camille as were discourses from elite culture. If Camille’s socialist leanings were first formed in England, they were mostly expressed from America, a culture he initially claimed to be devoid of class politics. Although he would rightly retract this statement as he spent further time exploring American culture, his own recontextualization in America created the context for his most influential writings.

Camille’s writings It is impossible to do justice to the breadth and extent of Camille’s contributions to medieval iconography, but it is possible to give some sense of their scope and their broader social and methodological agendas. Situating Camille’s work within medievalist art history, or art history more broadly, has been a challenge for commentators and critics. The speakers in the 2010 sessions at the College Art Association devoted to Camille’s work struggled to situate his work within the contours of art historical scholarship in the last quarter of the twentieth century. All agreed that, however “theoretical” Camille’s work may have been, it was

essentially “without explicit theoretical warrants for [its] theoretical frameworks and goals.”— Camille worked as an intellectual magpie, selecting theories and concepts that suited particular situations, and did not consistently adhere to a coherent tradition of analysis (or in Whitney Davis’s view, “he actually wasn’t a dyed-in-the-wool pansemiotician, narratologist or ‘calligramatologist’”).— His “distrust of theory” may well have its roots in his British training and its empiricist roots in which theory is frequently considered to “embellish” or “decorate” textual analysis, or is considered a foreign perversion (i.e., “imported” German philosophy or French poststructuralism). In other words, the “No theory please, we’re English” approach, in which specific theoretical streams or objectives (particularly when they become professional identities) are obfuscated or denied in intellectual discourse in favor of an assimilation to accepted discursive modes in British academic life, may well have inflected his writings.— Camille’s approach to iconography in particular was also neither consistent nor systematic. Although iconography as a practice was central to much of his work, it actually served as a jumping-off point, leading to new questions and approaches. Emblematic of this is his 1991 essay “Gothic Signs and the Surplus: The Kiss on the Cathedral” (which introduced the notion of “intervisuality” to medievalist art history), in which he opens with the image of two figures embracing and kissing (Luxuria) on the west front of Amiens (Fig. 12.2).— After evoking Émile Mâle, Camille seeks to relocate the image from an iconographical trajectory to a sexual trajectory: “When placed within the history of desire rather than the history of iconography, the Luxuria image emerges as more than a literal depiction of unlawful sexual relations outside marriage. In its lack of transcendent signifiers, it is a radically new type of representation precisely because this opens it up to a plurality of indeterminate associations,” a “surplus” of meanings apparently undetectable by iconography. Here as elsewhere, Camille wrote as a wordsmith and his own

rhetorical structures are worthy of consideration as they inform his overall approach. Atypical of his generation, Camille wrote broadly and often playfully, and not all of his work was intended to be read as empirical academic prose. Employing what has been called his “strategy of inversion,”— Camille set up a series of imagined contrasts in his writings between apparently polarized camps and positions in medievalist art history and/or in medieval culture: the “Old” and “New” Art History (a concept which seems to hold less water in our more historiographically aware present); medieval and modern - two polarities he would aim to dissolve, especially in his late writings; iconography and anti-iconography, center and margin, image and anti-image, and so on. Based not in the language of medievalist art history per se but rather in current poststructuralist criticism, these strategies were brilliantly successful in his writings, serving to expose material and methodological blind spots between two carefully articulated extremes. Camille’s first major study of medieval iconography was his 1989 study The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge University Press). Taking as its subject the theme of idol worship in later medieval art, he showed that images of idolatry represented “the other” to the dominant Christian hegemony of medieval Europe: pagans, Muslims, Jews, heretics, and homosexuals. Within Camille’s argument about later medieval idolatry was a paradox

Figure 12^2 Luxuria, Amiens West Front. Image courtesy of the Courtauld Institute of Art, James Austin Collection.

he readily acknowledged: that it coincided with the explosion of image making in the twelfth and especially thirteenth centuries, in which the cult statue or image and its miracle-working properties became commonplace. Pagan idols are imagined as being similar to yet distinct from the Christian cult image/statue, forming a rhetoric of anti-images that served as weapons against the nonChristian other. This paradox in fact formed the structure of his book, with Part I focusing on Christian attitudes toward the idols of non-Christian others, and Part 2 exploring the idols within Christianity. Extraordinary in its scope and dazzling in its range of references, The Gothic Idol terminates with a prospective look at

the Renaissance transformation of the idol, and the apparent shift of meaning of ancient art from idolatrous to artful in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Donatello’s bronze David (1430s) is the Gothic idol’s “most distinguished offspring”: witnessing the revival of the pagan pedestal statue, but for overtly Christian ends (unlike the attached Gothic niche statue), Camille’s David is a Christian nude, albeit one that does not “stand innocent” of pagan implications. David1 s power as a work of art as an idol - lies in its complex positioning between artistic categories: civic statue or idol, heroic Christian nude (typologically understood as David as Rex Christus) or youthful fetishist in high boots with a feather tickling his inner thigh. The end point of The Gothic Idol, David had the “power to embody ideas in the body that had, for more than a millennium, been banished to the margins of discourse.”— As Camille noted in his unpublished introduction to the French edition of the text (composed in the late 1990s), The Gothic Idol appeared contemporaneously with major texts that likewise considered medieval “images” rather than medieval “art,” including David Freedberg’s The Power of Images (1989), Jean Wirth’s L’image mediévalé: Naissance et Développements, and a year later, Hans Belting’s Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (1990). Unlike these texts, Camille insisted on the status of medieval images as “social tools” to “define ‘us’ against ‘them,’ stemming from the Christian definition of proper images against the idols of a defunct paganism.”— As noted, Camille sets up Émile Mâle’s classic study The Gothic Image as his own intellectual and methodological other, a kind of subjective positioning against prior authorities. At the center of Mâle’s work was an aesthetically beautiful analogy: the Gothic cathedral of the thirteenth century, with its stained-glass programs and sculpted facades, was a mirror of medieval scholastic thought as represented in Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum Maius. Mâle posited a literal and indis-soluble correspondence of text and

image in which the art of the cathedrals was (inevitably) a plastic manifestation of its textual sources. Ordered and guided by a male authority, the art of the cathedral will “find its place and the harmony of the whole will appear.”— Taking Mâle literally almost a century after his text was written (a convenient sleight of hand), Camille thought he “treated the cathedral as a coherent summa in stone, as it were, a form of writing.”— Developed from his early writings on the text-image relationships in medieval and Renaissance art (informed by the teachings of Norman Bryson), Camille sought to expose “the neatly organized foundations of Mâle’s cathedral [which] will reveal ambiguous gaps, inconsistencies, and contradictory cracks in what he saw as a supremely codified whole.”— For Camille and others of his generation who were exploring relationships between texts (intertextuality) and the “texuality” of images (images as texts), Mâle represented much that was deeply wrong about medievalist art history, and his attempt to dismantle Mâle has as much to do with the demonstrable logical flaws in his promotion of a mimetic relationship of text to image as it does with Camille’s own conception of Mâle’s pious ecclesiology and the paternalism that informed it, carrying with it “the strong whiff of incense and plainchant.”— As more than one reviewer noted of the book, Camille uses Mâle as a straw man, a convenient foil to his own very different enterprise. Neither a revision of Mâle’s text exactly nor a comprehensive theory of the medieval image, The Gothic Idol was difficult for reviewers to characterize, although Paul Binski’s review in the Burlington Magazine captures much of the book’s spirit: “It is a polemic both for a more theorized approach to medieval art, less obviously, for an essentially secularized vision of it.”— Arguably, Camille’s most coherent statement of iconographie method was delivered in his 1990 essay “Mouths and Meanings: Towards an Anti-Iconography of Medieval Art,” published in Princeton’s Iconography at the Crossroads volume.— Recounting

“art history’s obsession with written language” and its origins in philology, Camille here seeks to expose “the tyranny of the philological method” in medievalist art history by questioning how meaning in images could be discerned independently of a specific textual referent: Medieval images, whether in books or on walls, were, like medieval texts, dynamically delivered and performed aloud rather than absorbed in static isolation. The difficulty for the art historian becomes one of double translation - to explore in writing, ideas that might have originated through writing like Holy Writ, but which were then mediated outside or beyond it, in rituals, prayers, sermons, but most importantly of all in images.—

Camille’s subject here is a work of art that would appear to resolutely avoid association with a specific textual source: the Romanesque ex-situ trumeau at Souillac (Fig. 12.3). A rigidly ordered composition of grappling, twisting, and writhing bodies of birds, beasts, and men in combat,

Figure 123 Trumeau, Souillac. Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane.

chiastically positioned upon the face of the trumeau, it seems to contain only one image readily “decoded” by a textual source: Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22). Camille proposes a reading that is based on sources “somatic rather than semantic” from within the monastic culture of twelfth-century Souillac.— Attempting to understand the possible meanings of the battling figures within the context of “the spiritual life of the theologically trained monk,” Camille argues that its “dominant” or “theological” meaning was an exegesis of a range of ideas pertaining to spiritual

struggle of good over evil - the allegory of the inner state of the monk - reflected most obviously in the Psalms.— Beyond the dominant meaning, the trumeau’s animal imagery “articulates wider cultural metaphors of animality linked to human appetite and embodiment” beyond their purely theological sources. Camille’s “anti-iconography” allows for “the possibilities for projecting new and different words on images” toward “the rereading of a work against its ‘official’ ideological purpose which has to occur if works of art have any history at all.”— Although providing a rich account of possible textual sources for negotiating a viewer’s understanding of the trumeau and the potential indeterminacy of its meaning, Camille comes closest to articulating the nontextual or supertextual nature of the trumeau in his closing sentence: “the Souillac relief is more like a scream rent from a human body than words written outside it, words that have made us ‘stone’ deaf, even when the stones themselves ‘cry out.’”— Here as elsewhere in his work, Camille provides a caricature of iconography, and in this case, the iconographie methods of Erwin Panofsky. Camille’s “anti-iconography” is a brilliant intervention, although one that is not anti- iconographical in the strictest sense but rather “supericonographical,” as Jérôme Baschet has suggested.— Although he does not make reference to it, Camille’s description of the Souillac trumeau as a work of art that, intentionally perhaps, short-circuits iconography (or textual analogues of any sort) as a guide to reading images, is grounded in earlier scholarship outside of medieval art. Most influentially, perhaps, is T. J. Clark’s celebrated account of Manet’s Olympia (surely known but not cited by Camille), a work that, as Clark shows, resisted interpretation because it could not be readily located and rationalized within available textual discourses. In this sense, the Souillac trumeau and Manet’s Olympia can deservedly be understood as “a stew of half-digested significations.”— Arguably Camille’s most controversial book was his 1992 study Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art, published in

Reaktion’s Essays in Art and Culture series. In this study he returned to territory most fully mapped by Lillian Randall in 1966.— Focusing on a broad range of “marginalia” not only in the borders of the illuminated page, as Randall had done, but also on tapestries, ivory mirror cases, and the corbels and corners of medieval buildings, Camille employed “the edge” to explore liminality in medieval culture, as many others did in the early 1990s.— Positioning the edge opposite to the center allowed Camille to chart a strategy in Romanesque and Gothic art in which the center of a thing, whether an illuminated page or the sanctuary of a great church, represents the dominant views of the hegemony, while the margins represent things or beings excluded or eradicated from official discourse. The book opens with a theoretical chapter staking out the politicized “edges” of medieval art and culture and then offers four short chapters (monastery, cathedral, court, city), each focused upon an individual case study. The margins offered territory to explore and articulate Camille’s own vision of the Middle Ages, and Reaktion’s essay format allowed it to be largely untethered to the scholarly apparatus of notion and citation. Emphasizing his own hybridity, he describes his approach thus: “my heteroclite combination of methodologies, aping those of literary criticism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and anthropology, as well as those of art history, is an attempt to make my method as monstrous (which means deviating from the natural order) as its subject.”— Camille’s subjects are chosen less as representatives of the ethical and aesthetic “edges” of medieval culture but rather of modernity: animals and animality, nudity and sexuality, scatology, and so forth. Camille’s subchapter “Courtly Crap,” for example, discusses the scatological borders of a book of hours in Trinity College, Cambridge (MS B 11.22, f. 73r) (Fig. 12.4) and in the Romance of Alexander manuscript in Oxford, Bodleian (MS Bodl. 264, f. 56r), which potentially recount a “lover’s shitty gift,” or a bequest of feces from a man to a woman.— Camille was surely correct in suggesting that the sources for such imagery were

not singularly ecclesiastical (notably in exempla, a well-mined source for marginalia-), but were found in a range of other “nonofficial” sources, including fabliaux. Citing the overtly scatological

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Figure 12A Trinity College, Cambridge MS B 11.22, f. 73r. Image courtesy of Trinity College, Cambridge.

c. 1200 fabliau Audigier, which, typical of its genre, inverted conventions from Romance literature, Camille glossed this imagery with reference to the fabliau’s tale of one-upmanship in

which Audigier “takes on as one of his opponents an incontinent old woman, who forces him to eat three-and-a-half of her turds for breakfast, telling him ‘and then you will kiss my cunt and the crack of my ass.’” Then turning to content that would fit equally within a commentary on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Said, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), Camille glosses the notion of feces as a gift in the text: “in Audigier, the hero’s mother, Rainberge, brings Count Turgibus ‘a fist full of shit, then takes some of her piss and showers him with it,’ while the couple’s dowry consists of ‘quinze estrons de chien’”— (“fifteen pieces of dog shit”). Image on the Edge was a polarizing book in the 1990s. It deliberately avoided or subverted the conventions of medievalist art history through its “contrarian stance” toward, or “ritual of dissent” from, the language, philological, and bibliographical structure of the discipline.— Its 201 footnotes are ordered sequentially without concern for the divisions of chapters. Closer to the French essai (a test, trail, or attempt) it was neither densely researched nor crisply written, as more than one reviewer noted. The book was rigorously critiqued in a well-known review in The Art Bulletin by Jeffrey Hamburger, which reflected a clash of methodologies and subjectivities allegorized at the time as “The Sheriff of Nottingham taking on the Robin Hood of medievalist art history.” Yet, to critique this study as an academic monograph which in many respects it was never designed to be - gives the book more and less attention than it deserves. In retrospect, Image was experimental not for its development of iconographical method or for the introduction of new imagery or data, but as an experiment in subjectivity in medievalist art history writing. Arguably, the book sees Camille at his most personal and most comic and least connected to the conventions of his discipline. It was an attempt to reinsert an authorial subjectivity and (temporarily) overthrow the tradition of disinterested speculation - still a requisite philosophical stance in medievalist art writing. Camille’s Gothic Idol might be cited to give some sense of the

direction of Image on the Edge: “Where everything is coded and strictly demarcated, the possibilities of play and subversion are much greater. The same is true for the visual arts, where precisely because of the tyranny of traditional conventions, ludic overthrow is possible.”— Camille’s late work saw him focus on three particular areas of attention: the construction of the Middle Ages as an ideal or anti­ ideal of modernity (the subject of his last book The Gargoyles of Notre Dame, published posthumously in 2009); a project on secular urban imagery of the later Middle Ages entitled Signs and Street Life in Medieval France (for which he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000);— and images of homoeroticism in medieval art provisionally called The Stones of Sodom.— In closing I shall focus on this final path of his research, and particularly on one of Camille’s most penetrating analyses of medieval images: his 2001 essay “‘For Our Devotion and Pleasure’: The Sexual Objects of Jean, Duc de Berry,” published in Art History.— Taking account of perhaps the first great art collector in the European tradition, Camille sought to explore the medieval accusations of sodomy leveled against the duke in light of his collecting practices. In his supple and nuanced account, Camille focused in particular on the duke’s manuscripts, notably the calendar pages of the Très Riches Heures. Turning to the inventoriai January page featuring the duke in the traditional labor of feasting (Fig. 12.5), Camille argues that these images cannot be understood as a reflection of historical “reality” (an idea he developed elsewhere) but rather, citing Laplanche and Pontalis’s famous paper “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” as “a component of the duke’s fantasy.”— Camille rereads what has been understood as a conventional “January page” with the labor of feasting and gift giving (albeit one up to date with fifteenth-century conventions of verisimilitude and “portraiture”) as a fictive performance (or “phantasmatic projection”) of the duke’s erotic fantasy.

Figure 12S January page, Très Riches Heures. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I still recall sitting in the History of Art library at Scroope Terrace in Cambridge and reading Camille’s comment that “there is perhaps no fifteenth-century manuscript image as phallic in its imagery,” and that it comprises “a totally homosocial space,” which provided a shock of recognition that is still with me.— Exploring this canonical image, Camille draws attention not only to the relatively obvious phallic puns - the objects worn at the waist of the fashionable youths who attend the duke - but also to

the rather more complex and frankly sinister aspects of the image. Taking the place conventionally reserved for women in front of the fire screen (and particularly of the Madonna in Northern painting), the duke sits in profile surrounded by carefully articulated men and by carefully articulated objects, all seemingly coterminous parts of the duke’s broader psychology of collection and control. Drawing from psychoanalysis, Camille focuses on the duke’s heraldry (embroidered on a tapestry above the hearth) made up of a wounded swan and a bear. Interpreted by Millard Meiss and others to symbolize the love of a mysterious woman, Ursine (ours - bear and cygne - swan), Camille rereads the heraldry as “a more personal inventory of selfhood,” juxtaposing the large, grasping, aggressive, and masculine bear with the fleshy, white, youthful, and overtly feminine swan. This collision of age and youth, male virility and femininity, power and submission would seem to reflect the dynamics of many of the duke’s relationships, not only with “working-class” young men, including his servant Tacque-Tibaut, but also with his twelve-year-old bride, Jeanne de Boulogne. Camille’s reading is not a “queering” of the Duc de Berry, but rather something close to the opposite, an attempt to “mix up his gender into something more strange” than our modern sexual categories would allow.— Locating the Très Riches Heures and other objects owned by the duke within the context of the history of sexuality and sexual aesthetics, Camille provides a brilliant and enlivening reading of an image arguably deadened by its serial replication.— It will be clear from this brief account that Camille’s iconographie work reflected upon and challenged many of the conventions of his discipline, making him a fitting endpoint for this volume. Typical of the greatest medievalists, the rhetorical power of Camille’s writing drew from the author’s typological identification with the Middle Ages as a mirror of sorts of the modern present, a period of radical subjectivity, class upheaval, and social, aesthetic, and sexual play.— He often reflected upon this, as in his well-known comparison of the cathedrals of the high

Middle Ages with “the shimmering Postmodern towers of today’s corporate headquarters.”— Camille’s Middle Ages developed in his writing as a prelude of sorts to modernity, of a messy, fractious, dissenting culture that consistently resisted or opposed hegemonic regimes, whether political, sexual, artistic, or scopic. In this, Camille positions the Middle Ages as not so much as an other to modernity but rather its evil twin. Camille often reflected upon this kinship, but never more eloquently or with greater humor than in his interview on NPR’s This American Life, which I noted in my introduction. Serving as America’s main interlocutor for the art of the Middle Ages in the 1990s, Camille commented upon one of our own medievalist fantasies, Medieval Times. Emphasizing continuities in performance - the “over the top” nature of the spectacle, its overt and self-conscious glamor, and the play upon well-worn images of the Middle Ages (the joust, the knight) and its sexual clichés (wenches and codpieces) - Camille rightly commented that it “is so very medieval.”

Notes 1 I am principally indebted to Stuart Michaels, Michael Camille’s partner during his years in Chicago, for offering me an extended interview on Michael’s life and work, and for being a wonderful host while I was in Chicago. I am also grateful to others who knew Michael Camille who answered many questions: Paul Binski, Madeline Caviness (who read and commented upon a draft of this chapter), Whitney Davis, Jongwoo Kim, Elizabeth Legge, Sherry Lindquist, W.J.T. Mitchell, Nina Rowe and Linda Seidel. Finally, I am grateful to Colum Hourihane for asking me to write it in the first place. 2 P. Crossley, “The Integrated Cathedral: Thoughts on ‘Holism’ and Gothic Architecture,” in The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness, ed. E.S. Lane, E.C.

Pastan, and E.M. Shortell (Farnham, 2009), 157-73, at 160. 3 For Camille’s writings, see K. Boeyes, “A Bibliography of the Writings of Michael Camille,” Gesta 41:2 (2002), 141-44. 4 W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture and Media Aesthetics (Chicago, 2015), 3. Mitchell’s introduction is derived from his paper at College Art Association Chicago on Michael Camille (see n. 7 below). For Camille as a “New Art Historian,” see J. Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction (London, 2001) 3. 5 M. Camille “The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Merrie England,” in History Today 48:9 (1998), 13-19. Camille would comment on this in his later work: “Rethinking the Canon: Prophets, Canons, and Promising Monsters,” Art Bulletin, 78:2 (1996), 198-201, as “those aspects of art history that I had despised - triumphant nationalism, a purely stylistic taxonomy of objects, and a rigidly chronological system of their classification.” On nationalism in medievalist art historiography, see J. Alexander, “Medieval Art and Modern Nationalism,” Medieval Art, Recent Perspectives: A Memorial Tribute to C.R. Dodwell, ed. G.O. Crocker and T. Graham (Manchester/New York, 1998), 206-23; P. Crossley, “Anglia Perdita: English Medieval Architecture and NeoRomanticism,” in Tributes to Jonathan J.G. Alexander, ed. S. L’Engel and G.B. Guest (London, 1996), 471-85; R. Marks, “The Englishness of English Gothic Art?,” in C. Hourihane (ed), Gothic Art and Thought in the Later Medieval Period, (Princeton 2011), 64-89. R. Marks, Studies in the Art and Imagery of the Middle Ages (London, 2012), 1-32. 6 Cited and discussed in N. Giffney and M. O’Rourke, The Ashgate Companion to Queer Theory (Farnham, 2009), 438. 7 “Discipline on the Edge: Michael Camille and the Shifting Contours of Art History, 1985-2010,” sessions at the College Art Association Conference in Chicago (2010). I am grateful to Madeline Caviness, Whitney Davis, and Tom Mitchell for sending me their papers in this session, all of which I cite here. Perhaps the most extensive of the many obituaries published is R.S. Nelson and L. Seidel, “Michael Camille: A Memorial,” Gesta XLI:2 (2002), 137-9.

8 The Michael Camille Papers are now held at the Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. At the present moment the papers have not been fully processed, so the box and file numbers cited ahead are likely to change. The Michael Camille Papers have been most carefully explored by Robert Nelson, who plans to publish a paper on them in the near future. 9 I cite here from Madeline Caviness’s unpublished paper, “Of Camille, Chameleons, and Camelot: The Shifting Politics of Medieval Studies in the 1980s and Beyond.” (See note 7.) 10 W. Davis (ed.), Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History (New York/London, 1994), 161-88, 162. 11 Thanks to Stuart Michaels for discussing this with me. 12 I quote here from W. Davis’s unpublished response, “Losing My Religion: Michael Camille and Medieval Art History,” from the “Discipline on the Edge” sessions. (See note 7.) 13 Thanks to Stuart Michaels for discussing this with me. 14 For example, Camille, “‘For Our Devotion and Pleasure’: The Sexual Objects of Jean, Due de Berry,” Art History 24:2 (2001), 169-94, 188. 15 Thomas Wright’s The Worship of the Generative Powers during the Middle Ages of Western Europe (London, 1866) explored a range of sexual imagery and was published alongside Richard Payne Knight’s 1786 Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, upon which it was based. Wright also composed a significant early account of marginalia, A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art (London, 1875). 16 Little attention has been paid to sexual alterity in the formation of medieval art history, although considerable attention has been paid to the role of queerness in the rise of medievalist fiction. For example, G. Haggerty, Queer Gothic (Urbana/Chicago, 2006); A. Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Pre-History of a Homosexual Role (New York, 1999). I have touched upon these issues elsewhere in a discussion of eighteenthcentury medievalism: M.M. Reeve, “Gothic Architecture, Sexuality and

License at Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill,” Art Bulletin XCV (2013), 411-39. 17 University of Chicago, Regenstein Library, Michael Camille Papers, Box 27, “Gay Collecting” file. This box also includes files on the collections of Horace Walpole and William Beckford. 18 Caviness, “Of Camille, Chameleons, and Camelot.” (See note 7.) 19 I am grateful to Paul Binski for this insight. See John Mullen and Giles Foden “Peterhouse Blues,” The Guardian September 10, 1999. 20 M. Camille, Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England (Chicago, 1998). 21 J. Brooker, ‘“Has the World Changed or Have I Changed?’, The Smiths and the Challenge of Thatcherism,” Why Pamper Life's Complexities? Essays on the Smiths, ed. S. Campbell and C. Coulter (Manchester, 2010, 22-42). 22 Caviness, “Of Camille, Chameleons, and Camelot” (see note 7). 23 Davis, “Losing My Religion” (see note 7). 24 On these issues, I am indebted to M.A. Cheetham, Art Writing, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism in Britain: The “Englishness” of English Art Theory since the Eighteenth Century (Farnham, 2012). 25 Yale French Studies 80 (1991), 151-70. On intervisuality, see C. Karkov, Text and Picture in Anglo Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript (Cambridge, 2009), 17. 26 J. Hamburger’s review of The Gothic Idol, in The Journal of Religion 72:1 (1992), 109. 27 M. Camille, The Gothic Idol, Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1992), 345. 28 For Camille’s Introduction, see University of Chicago, Regenstein Library, Michael Camille Papers, Box 30, “Reviews of Gothic Image” File. 29 É. Mâle, The Gothic Image, trans. Dora Nussey (London/Glasgow, 1961),

26. 30 Camille, Gothic Idol (as in note 27), xxvii. 31 Camille, Gothic Idol (as in note 27), xxvii. For Camille’s indebtedness to Bryson, see J. Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction (London, 2001). 32 Crossley, “The Integrated Cathedral” (as in note 2), 160. 33 P. Binski, review of Gothic Idol in Burlington Magazine 134: 1066 (1992), 36-7 at p. 36: “It reaches the parts Mâle did not aim to reach, and thus casts doubt on postmedieval notions of what lay at the centre of medieval art.” 34 M. Camille, “Mouths and Meanings: Towards an Anti-Iconography of Medieval Art,” Iconography at the Crossroads, Index of Christian Art Occasional Papers II, ed. B. Cassidy (Princeton, 1993), 43-58. 35 “Mouths” (as in note 34), n. 3 and 44-45. 36 “Mouths” (as in note 34), 46. 37 “Mouths” (as in note 34), 51. See also K.M. Openshaw, “Weapons in the Daily Battle: Images of the Conquest of Evil in the Early Medieval Psalter,” Art Bulletin 75:1 (1993), 17-38. 38 “Mouths” (as in note 34), 52. 39 “Mouths” (as in note 34), 54. 40 J. Baschet, “Iconography beyond Iconography: Relational Meanings and Figures of Authority in the Reliefs at Souillac,” in Current Directions in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Sculpture Studies, ed. R.A. Maxwell and K. Ambrose (Tumhout, 2010), 23-46. Camille spends little energy critiquing Meyer Schapiro’s classic account of Souillac: M. Schapiro, “The Sculptures of Souillac,” in Medieval Studies in Memory of A. Kingsley Porter, II (Cambridge, 1939), 359-87. This is undoubtedly due to Camille’s own identification with Schapiro as a medievalist-modernist and as a socialist/Marxist. Camille charted his own kinship with Schapiro in M. Camille, “‘How New York Stole the Idea of Romanesque Art’: Medieval, Modern, and Postmodern in Meyer Schapiro,” Oxford

Art Journal 17:1 (1994), 65-75. 41 T.J. Clark, “Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of ‘Olympia’ in 1865,” Screen 21:1 (1980), 18-41, at 29. 42 L. Randall, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1966). 43 L. Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,” Speculum LXV (1990), 87-107; N. Kenaan-Kedar, “The Margins of Society in Marginal Romanesque Sculpture,” Gesta XX (1992), 115-24. For a recent discussion of Camille’s theories on the margins in the context of Byzantine manuscript illumination, see Roland Betancourt, “Faltering Images: failure and error in Byzantine manuscript illumination”, Word and Image 32:1 (2016), 1-20. 44 M. Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1992), 9. 45

K.P.

Wentersdorf,

“‘The

Symbolic

Significance

of the

‘Figura

Scatalogicae’ in Gothic Manuscripts,” in Word, Picture and Spectacle, ed. C. Davidson (Kalamazoo, 1984), 1-20. 46 Classically in L. Randall, “Exempla and Their Influence on Gothic Marginal Illumination,” Art Bulletin 39 (1957), 97-107. 47 Camille, Image (as in note 44), 114. 48 J. Hamburger, review of Image on the Edge in The Art Bulletin 75 (1993), 319-27. 49 Camille, Gothic Idol (as in note 27), 311. 50 Other publications related to this project include “At the Sign of the ‘Spinning Sow’: The ‘Other’ Chartres and Images of Everyday Life of the Medieval Street,” in History and Images: Toward a New Iconology, ed. A. Bolvig and P. Lindley (Turnhout, 2003), 249-76. “Signs of the City: Place, Power, and Public Fantasy in Medieval Paris,” in Medieval Practices of Space, ed. B. Hanawalt and M. Kobialka (London/Minneapolis, 2000), 136. 51 Other publications related to this project include “The Pose of the Queer:

Dante’s Gaze, Brunetto Latini’s Body,” Queering the Middle Ages, ed. G. Burger and S.F. Kruger (Minniapolis, 2001), 57-86; “Dr. Witkowski’s Anus: French Doctors, German Homosexuals, and the Obscene in Medieval Church Art,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. N. McDonald (York, 2006), 17-38. 52 M. Camille, ‘Devotion and Pleasure’ (as in note 14). 53 M. Camille, “Devotion and Pleasure” (as in note 14), 175. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 49:1 (1968), 1-18. In Mirror in Parchment (as in note 20), Camille argued that its images are not accurate “portrayals” of medieval life - potted portraits on the medieval page of objective, ocular “reality” - but rather “imaginary constructions and idealiza tions” (p. 81), and that “One of the problems of seeing images as mirrors of history is that history does not stand still long enough to get its portrait painted” (p. 67). 54 M. Camille, “Devotion and Pleasure” (as in note 14), 174, 180. 55 M. Camille, “Devotion and Pleasure” (as in note 14), 188. 56 Camille had commented on this in his early work: “The Très Riches Heures: An Illuminated Manuscript in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Critical Inquiry XVII (1990), 72-107. 57 The medieval-modern paradox in medieval studies has been recently explored in twentieth-century historiography and art practice in B. Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago, 2005) and A. Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time (New York, 2012). 58 Camille, Image (as in note 44), 77. See also Camille, “‘How New York Stole’” (as in note 40), 65-75.

Part II

Systems and cataloguing tools

13

The Anthropology of Images Ralph Dekoninck

During the Middle Ages, the Church, especially in the West, never stopped wanting to classify the image as a symbol, in order to avoid as far as possible any danger of idolatry - that is, of confusion between image and model. It was therefore a matter of casting a modest veil over the materiality of the image, which was all too likely to attract the gaze of the viewer; this of course was expected to fade into the background to allow the translatio ad prototypumr - that is, to allow the gaze to move toward the model. From this perspective, the dictum Gregorii, drawn from the famous letter of Gregory the Great to the iconoclast bishop Serenus of Marseille, was to be the doxa for more than a millennium in matters relating to the Christian imagery: “In it [painting], the illiterate read. Hence, and chiefly to the nations, a picture is instead of reading (lectione).”- The image here plays the role of language, able to stand in for the sacred text in order to serve those who do not have access to it. We should note that it was this idea of the image which was the foundation for research in Christian iconography, and was to leave a profound impression on our understanding of the functions of the medieval image, whose principal goal was to teach Christian doctrine and to inculcate the story of Salvation.- Our way of “naturally” interpreting images in terms of meaning is historically deeply rooted in our way of

thinking.

From representation to presence Throughout the Middle Ages the image played a number of roles which research has attempted to reveal in all its complexity. The present chapter aims to give an account of the various research perspectives for images that are to be found in the field of historical anthropology. These perspectives are characterized by what might be called a critical standpoint toward iconography, a criticism that highlights what at first sight seems to escape an iconographic “reading” but which ultimately can be integrated within a broadened iconographic perspective. As a reaction to the logocentrism that sees the image as a text to be read, the pendulum has tended to swing the other way and research has shifted attention from meaning to the material presence of images. Images appear as objects endowed with a certain power,- a feature that short-circuits the classical metaphysics of representation, whose tendency is to reduce representation to a disembodied sign or as an imitation of reality that has a symbolic or mimetic meaning. In this respect it is possible to speak of a return to presence instead of representation. This is probably a reaction to the increasing dematerialization of images in contemporary society, the very term “image” now tending to make us forget its material density.The presence of the image, especially in the Middle Ages, has never been as isolated as a work of art hanging in a museum might be (and yet is such a work really isolated, the museum itself being a frame that locates the work of art?); the image or object is always located in a specific place and within a network of other artifacts, gestures, words, sounds, smells... After considering the nature of the work, it is therefore necessary to go beyond its immediate frame to understand it within a network of

relationships that are thus fashioned around it and because of it. In this way, the idea of the image as the object, also forming a knotwork of social actions and interactions with it being at one and the same time the object and the means.- Turning away from icono-graphic and stylistic approaches, research has attempted to understand the uses and practices to which an image can give rise. From this, a body of thought on the functions of the image and on its power to bring about actions or reactions has developed.

From the material turn to the performative turn The image does not simply produce actions or reactions; it can also act. This is where it touches on the question of performance. Nobody has spoken of the performative turn - a new emphasis on what, since Alfred Gell, has also been called the agency of the image.- While it had long been recognized that the image could arouse an emotion, an emotion which in turn was able to provoke a motion,- such as prayer, conversion, or donation - in this respect, we may say that the image is performative insofar as it engages the spectator in a performance - it is even possible to say that images are effective only when they are performed, in the sense of the performing arts-, it still remains to be understood how certain actions and intentions particular to the human being can be applied to the image. In other words, how is it possible to understand the image as agent - that is to say, as an object endowed with an ability to act and not simply as a thing to be manipulated or interpreted as a passive transporter of ideas? To put it simply, if an image can make us cry, how can it cry itself, or how can we believe that it might cry? This move from the material turn to the performative turn characterizes a series of research projects carried out in a wide variety of fields, all of which attempt

to go beyond what images tell us or show us toward what they want. This echoes the title of a book by W.J.T. Mitchell,- whose work is interested in the life of images, and above all in the “needs, desires and demands they embody”— and what animates them; in short, this work is interested in what we want from images. Alongside Mitchell’s seminal work, a leading place must be reserved for the anthropology of art devised by Alfred Gell,— which has inspired a series of studies, all of which examine the reasons we react to images as if they were alive. The anthropologist considers images as actors in social life, as mediators in social processes. Gell distinguishes “primary agents” - namely, human beings - from “secondary agents” - that is, the artifacts by which primary agents distribute their agency when interacting with the world. This is therefore a purely relational notion with no ontological content. Gell speaks of an “art nexus” to designate this system of actions, intended to change the world rather than encode it.— One cannot fail to notice that this new interest in the life and performance of images, in what they do rather than what they represent, has in large part been initiated by medievalists. They were among the first to shift attention from the presence of the image-object toward the image as body,— thus locating their research in the vast field of the anthropology of images, the idea for which grew out of the assimilation of image and human being, with image agency merging with human agency. In wishing to endow representation with presence it was all the confusion between the image and its model that attracted research attention. While breaking with a certain symbolic paradigm that reduced the image to the level of a sign, this research perpetuated another paradigm that underlies the history and theory of representation: that of mimesis based on the idea of resemblance, however schematic this resemblance might be. To take up the typology of the different modalities of “Bildakt” developed by Horst Bredekamp, it is possible to speak here of “substitutive Bildakt,” which rests on a logic of substitution between image and model.—

The prototypical example of this kind of confusion is of beliefs relating to miraculous images. Images that can move, cry, speak, bleed, heal, or drive away the Devil in effect constitute the paradigm of images that act. Christian image theory called this power that animates images by the term virtus, and it was established from the outset that this power was not intrinsic to them but transmitted by divine power.— According to Christian doctrine, this power was thought to travel from the model through the image, or else to inhabit the image temporarily according to popular beliefs, or to communicate with it through contact with holy material, especially relics, or even through a suitable ritual such as consecration. “Thus, virtus is a quality of the image, or the image is its vehicle, or it inhabits the image, or it is bestowed upon the image, or it is experienced and communicated by the image.”—

Naturalist and culturalist approaches Since the image was clearly not endowed with autonomous life and had no intrinsic power, the question of its powers naturally shifted to the question of belief in these powers, belief which can be deduced from the kinds of reaction images aroused, from the most extreme, such as adoration or destruction, to the most common, such as lighting a candle before them. Taking up a favorite idea from Marcel Mauss, an idea which he applied to magic, it might be possible to say that the efficacy of the image is the result of and not the reason for us believing in its powers.— But what causes or supports this belief? What is acting in or through this kind of image? Two kinds of answers have been made to these questions: one naturalist, the other culturalist. The first says that belief in the power of the image is anchored in human nature, inscribed within the structures of the human mind. In this respect it has been possible to speak of a universal anthropological or even

psychological characteristic. This naturalist approach encourages an enquiry with no chronological and geographical restriction into the way mankind, through its instinct for imitation, tends to attribute action or life to images. In other words, human beings have the cognitive ability to merge the image and the person or subject it resembles. The image thus derives its power essentially from the viewer, who projects on to it his or her own intentions. This is the viewpoint adopted by David Freedberg in his The Power of Images of 1989— and which he subsequently extended into the field of the neurosciences. Even if he defends himself against the criticism of having neglected the contextual elements that play a part in the living presence of images, he encourages historians and anthropologists to “develop an argument on the cognitive schemas which underlie this or that reaction and which are subject to the pressures of the context.”— The culturalist approach consists in investigating all the contextual - that is to say, cultural - circumstances at work so that an image may become active.— As opposed to a claimed universality, precise historical reasons are invoked, reasons that are essentially social in origin. To distinguish it from “an internalist concept of agency,” which holds that belief in the powers of the image “is triggered by factors that develop out of the interiority of the person, thoughts, desires, intentions, etc.,”— Gell speaks of the “externalist idea” that attributes these powers to a given socioreligious context. This explains in part why a particular image becomes activated in specific circumstances. As we have seen, Gell firmly locates himself in this perspective by seeing images as actors “in a network of social relationships.” In other words, the reasons for belief are to be sought other than in the psyche of the viewer, and especially in the social forces acting through the image, which Mitchell has referred to as “ventriloquism.” This culturalist perspective is found in a broad swath of art historical research inspired by cultural and visual studies, in which

“the image is more often than not seen as a representation, a visual construct that betrays the ideological agenda of its makers and whose content is susceptible to manipulation by its receivers.”— Hence, it is a matter of seeing “around the edges of images in order to determine the social forces responsible for their ideological agendas’ and “of identifying the political commitments of those who make and consume them.”— The stress is thus laid on the operators of the image, those who make it act, who make it active, and even more on those who are activated by it - that is to say, manipulated by those who are pulling the strings. On the grounds that the efficacy of an image can be measured only by the responses it arouses or provokes, reception studies largely seem to have dominated research that has adopted this culturalist point of view, which saw the image as an instrument in the service of a power or an ideology, or as the medium serving to challenge this same power.

Intrinsic image-act: the power of ornament In emphasizing the upstream (conditions of creation) and even more so the downstream (modalities of reception), both naturalist and culturalist points of view have tended to obscure the intrinsic being of the image as a factor that can activate its power. Hence the appeal from G. Bart-holeyns and T. Golsenne that “In order to analyse the performance of image, we need to turn less towards the reaction of spectators than towards the image itself, in its own materiality, in the pragmatic conditions of the manifestation of its iconic power.”— In this regard Bredekamp speaks of “intrinsiche Bildakt” (intrinsic image-act) to account for the intrinsic power of images. The presence in question here is no longer that of the referent in the image or of the forces manipulating it, but that of

the image itself, and it matters little whether this is anthropomorphic.— It is a matter of recognizing images as real actors “possessed of sovereign agency separable from their handling or their perception by people.”— In contrast to Alfred Gell, who saw manufactured objects as a crucible of social relationships, and to Hans Belting, who investigated the relationships between iconic medium and human body,— Bredekamp attempts to grasp a principle of life (Eigenleberi) in images that can no longer be seen conceived as a direct extension of the human body or society, but as a force (Eigenkraft) emanating naturally from images themselves, a force that can act on the body as on society.— It is possible to speak of figural forces, to use the terminology of Louis Marin,— while Bredekamp prefers to speak of Potentia or Latenz to designate these latencies activated at a precise moment or in particular circumstances. To see the image as a force is in fact to take an interest in power as potential, in potentiality - that is to say, in the entirety of what the image is able to bring about. What then are the characteristics of this latent force, and what activates or intensifies it, what contributes to its performance and to its efficacy? “What power enables an image, when it is seen or handled, to spring out of latency into an outward effect on sensation, thinking, and action?’— Apart from the image’s presence as object and its resemblance as body, scholarly attention has been directed mainly toward its ornamentation, a dimension that seems to have escaped the field of iconography, of meaning, and of representation.— This new interest has also had the result of reintroducing the issue of the aesthetic dimension of images, a dimension that must not be reduced simply to the philosophical sense of beauty but to which it is necessary to restore the etymological sense relating to sensibility. The anthropology of the image and the visual studies have attempted to deconstruct the aesthetic approach to the work of art so that other modes might be considered,— or rather other forms of reaction suppressed or sublimated by the aesthetic

reaction, with the consequence that this dimension has been neglected in research. Now, the power of images can be brought back to the question of their sensible force, whatever may have been thought of the split between the age of the image and the age of art or between the cult of the religious image and culture of the artistic image. “For it is perhaps, in the context of a pragmatic analysis of its means, through its aesthetic quality (its intensity of appearance), that the image, whether work of art or devotional image, can become effective.”—

Figure 13J_ Michelozzo di Bartolomeo (attr.) and Pagno di Lapo Pertigiani,

tabernacle for the SS. Annunziata (c. 1340), 1448-49, Florence, SS. Annunziata.

These principles have been applied especially to sacred images, with special attention given to the sumptuous nature of their workmanship, the issue here being to know what role this played in belief in the powers of these images. Images reputed to be miraculous were extensively embellished, from the lavish material used to adorn them to the altarpiece, the chapel, or even the church dedicated to it, not to mention the numerous ex voto offerings surrounding it (Fig. 13.1). It was out of respect for the subject represented that they were honored with decorations that is to say, honor was expressed in material terms. It is possible to speak of a natural willingness to adorn them as a reminder that these ordinary images have extraordinary virtues. While texts of the period emphasize the fact that this addition of beauty was not the origin of faith but a witness to it, practice partly contradicts theory by showing that it was also tangible proof of the efficacy of the cultic image. As Freedberg recognizes, decoration serves to “aesthetically differentiate,”— its efficacy lying, among other things, in its “visual particularity.”— But he also emphasizes the fact that this feature is not the cause of the efficacy. In fact, according to Freedberg, belief in the power of miraculous images was at the most stimulated by the ornamental “layers”: Could one say that apparently rude or plain images [...] work only because of the splendor in which they are housed? Apparently not. We only have to read the many accounts, often contemporary with their discovery, of how they work while they are still outside in the cold, hanging on a tree, or pathetically painted on some shabby street corner. They work before the fancy or elevated forms of enshrinement or decoration were applied to them.—

As Golsenne maintains, it is possible to say that “the efficacy of cult images is not aesthetic but ‘magical.’ Its power does not produce a feeling of beauty, or disinterested pleasure, but it acts on

the body and its humours.”— In contrast to Freedberg, however, Golsenne emphasizes the fact that for the faithful, all the decorative apparatus that exalts the image demonstrates the image’s miraculous power; for the historian-anthropologist, the power to confer miraculous value on the image is due to this decorative apparatus. Although the embellishments seem simply to honor an object of value - in reality they confer value on this object, in a relationship which is equivalent to that which links the reliquary to the relic. As Jean-Claude Schmitt has proposed, for the believer it is the relic that makes the reliquary. For the anthropologist, however, “it is the reliquary that makes the relic,” in the sense that it supplies the institutional and visual proof of the relic’s authenticity.— This analogy between image and reliquary which has a certain historical pertinence if we refer to the statuereliquaries of the eleventh and twelfth centuries through which a kind of “revolution” in the Christian image was performed - has the merit of emphasizing the essential connection that links the image to its ornamentation. It is therefore possible to extrapolate and speak of the agency of precious materials used to decorate sacred images. This is the hypothesis offered by Golsenne, who writes, “The adornment does not follow the miracle but makes possible the belief that a miracle has been performed by means of such an image.”— He adds, “a cult image is not effective, magical, on its own”; “the adornment produces this life which is lacking in the venerated image, makes it attractive; [...] gives it a surplus of existence.”— But placing the accent in this way on votive adornments as the main animators of the image and activators of belief has the consequence of putting the image itself in parentheses. If it goes without saying that the image in itself has no effective power, except in belief, the aesthetic dimension should not be reduced to that of the artistic value of the image. The unsophisticated, even “primitive,” appearance of many miraculous images not only was recognized as a sign of their antiquity and therefore as proof of their sacrality (in that the origin of these

images has been lost in the mists of time) but also generated a visual impact that can be likened to what anthropologists have written about African “fetishes.”— Their immutability and rusticity, not to mention their “primitive” quality, were only intensified by the contrast with the artistic adornment that gave them life. Their artistic “poverty” takes nothing away from their aesthetic power - that is to say, the emotional impact they generated and that the sumptuous embellishments extended. In the end, the question that must be answered is to see if this attention to the power of images surpasses, or even puts paid to, iconographic analysis. Rather than opposing “effects of sense” and “effects of presence,” meaning and performance, it would be preferable, as J. Baschet advocates, to consider the areas of overlap between the two: “The work does not simply transmit a meaning to be decrypted; it also produces an effect. This dimension must be integrated within an iconographic approach, since it is true that meaning offers itself through the effect produced by the work.”— The way in which materiality affects meaning needs to be considered, and the way in which meaning is conveyed and often transformed by the force of the image, but also by the ornamental apparatus accompanying it and bringing it before the viewer, also needs to be examined. The internalist explanation (how the image becomes a space in which the human psyche is projected) and the externalist explanation (how the image comes to be socially empowered) need to be combined without forgetting their formal characteristics. In the same way, an anthropological history of resemblance and a historical sociology of performance need to be joined together. Staying with J. Baschet, it is possible to speak of “active forms and meanings”: Within such configurations, the power of the image-object depends just as much on the presence it confers on painted figures, on its ornamental superabundance, as it does on an overload of meaning whose very excess contributes to producing an effect of sacrality and to the efficacy which may thus go together with it.—

Notes 1 Basil the Great, De Spiritu Sancto, 18, 45, in PG 32, col. 149. Originally intended to clarify the relationship of the Father and Son in the Trinity, this formula was adopted by the theology of the image to describe the type of adoration owed to the latter. See G.B. Ladner, “The Concept of the Image in the Greek Fathers and the Byzantine Iconoclastic Controversy,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 7 (1953), 3-34. 2 “in ipsa legunt qui litteras nesciunt; unde praecipue gentibus pro lectione pictura est.” Gregory the Great, Registrum Epistolarum, XI, 13, Ad Serenum Massiliensum Episcopum, in Corpus Christianorum, 140A, 874, The Letters of Gregory the Great, translated, with introduction and notes, by John R.C. Martyn (Toronto, 2004). C.M. Chazelle, “Pictures, Books and the Illiterate: Pope Gregory I’s Letters to Serenus of Marseilles,” Word & Image, 6 (1990), 138-53. L. Duggan, “Was Art Really the ‘Book of the Illiterate’?,” Word & Image 5 (1989), 227-251. J.-C. Schmitt, “Écriture et image: les avatars médiévaux du modèle grégorien,” in Théories et pratiques de Récriture au Moyen Age, ed. E. Baumgartner and C. Marchello-Nizia (Paris, 1988), 119-28. R. Recht, “Line Bible pour illettrés? Sculpture gothique et ‘théâtre de mémoire’,” Critique 586 (1996), 188-206. M. Gougaud, “Muta praedicatio,” Revue bénédictine 42 (1930), 168-71. 3 See J. Baschet, L'iconographie médiévale (Paris, 2008); see especially the introduction “Pour en finir (vraiment) avec la Bible des illettrés,” 26-33. 4 Jérôme Baschet has chosen to speak of the “image-object” as a reminder “that images, and particularly those of the Middle Ages, are inseparable from their materiality, but also from their thing-ness, understood as the quality of being sovereign, eluding at one and the same time the representation and functionality of the object.” J. Baschet, “Images en acte et agir social,” in La Performance des images, ed. G. Bartholeyns, A. Dierkens, and T. Golsenne (Brussels, 2010), 10. 5 See K. Moxey, “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn,” Journal of Visual

Culture 7 (2008), 131-46. J. Wolff, “After Cultural Theory: The Power of Images, the Lure of Immediacy,” Journal of Visual Culture 11 (2012), 319. H.U. Gumbrecht, The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, 2003). 6 See, in particular, the actor-network theory elaborated by B. Latour: Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford, 2005). 7 A. Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, 1998). 8 It is possible to refer for example to the antique tradition of the imagines agentes - that is, images that were striking in their beauty, ugliness, colors, and associations. 9 “The interpretation of images would be decentered in favor of an investigation of the authority and affect of images. This would lead back, of course, to the issue of overestimation and visual superstitions. The question for art historians in that case would be, not ‘what pictures mean?’ but ‘what do pictures want?'" W.J.T. Mitchell, “What Is Visual Culture?,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky’s 100th Birthday, ed. I. Lavin (Princeton, 1995), 544. 10 W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Image, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago, 2011), xix. 11 Gell, Art and Agency (as in note 7). 12 See C. van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object (Leiden, 2015), 45-52. P. Descola, “La double vie des image,” in Penser Pimage II: Anthropologie du visuel, ed. E. Alloa (Paris, 2015), 131-45. 13 J.-C. Schmitt, Le corps, les rites, les rêves, le temps: Essais d'anthropologie médiévale (Paris, 2001). J.-C. Schmitt, Le Corps des images: Essais sur la culture visuelle au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2002). H. Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. T. Dunlap (Princeton, 2014). J. Wirth, Qu'est-ce qu'une image (Geneva, 2013), especially chapter V: “La performativité de l’image?.”

14 H. Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts: Über das Lebensrecht des Bildes (Berlin, 2010). 15 I would like to thank Gil Bartholeyns for letting me know of his forthcoming contribution (“The Dynamis of the Medieval Imago: An Unrecognized Topicality”) to the Dynamis of the Image: For an Archeology of Potentialities volume, the result of the research initiative cosponsored by Collège d’études mondiales and Gerda Henkel Stiftung and directed by Chiara Cappelletto et Emmanuel Alloa. 16 G. Bartholeyns, “The Dynamis of the Medieval Imago” (as in note 15). 17 M. Mauss, A General Theory of Magic (London, 2005). 18 D. Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago/London, 1989). 19 This quotation comes from the preface for the French translation of Le Pouvoir des images, trans. A. Girod (Paris, 1998), 5. 20 See J. Goody, in his Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalence towards Images, Theatre, Fictions, Relics and Sexuality (Oxford, 1997). 21 Gell, Art and Agency (as in note 7), 126. 22 Moxey, “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn” (as in note 5), 132. 23 Moxey, “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn” (as in note 5), 142. 24 G. Bartholeyns and T. Golsenne, “Une théorie des actes d’images,” in La Performance des images (as in note 4), 19. 25 “It should be clear that, with its living images, its automata, and its biofacta, the Schematic Image-Act encompasses the patterns of thought and action for images that live through [human] bodies, through auto­ motion, and through biological constitution. The Substitutive Image-Act, in contrast, does not evoke the living components of images; rather, it exchanges images and bodies for one another. In this way, effects are attained by direct means - sometimes deadly means in the case of destructive media.” Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts (as in note 14), 328, trans. B. Kitzinger in her review of the book for the CAA.reviews (September 2014) CrossRef doi:10.3202/caa.reviews.2014.103.

26 Bredekamp, Théorie des Bildakts (as in note 14), 51; B. Kitzinger (as in note 25). 27 Belting, An Anthropology of Images (as in note 13). 28 Kitzinger (as in note 25). 29 The opposition between a classical philosophy of the image as representing something and the image that makes something, which possesses a specific “force,” had already been clearly stated by Louis Marin: “Hence the attempt to grasp, by returning to the ‘originating’ question, the being of the image, not by returning it to being itself, not by making of the being of the image the pure and simple, and cognitively insufficient, or even deceptive image of being, its mimeme, but by examining its ‘virtues’, as would have been said in the past, its latent or manifest forces, in short, its efficacy, if this were even known. The being of the image, in a word, is its force.” L. Marin, Des pouvoirs de l'image: Gloses (Paris, 1992), 10. 30 Bredekamp, Théorie des Bildakts (as in note 14), 52. 31 See J.-C. Bonne, “Ornementation et representation,” in Les images dans TOccident médiéval, ed. J. Baschet and P.-O. Dittmar (Turnhout, 2015), 199-212; J.-C. Bonne, “De l’ornemental dans l’art médiéval (Vlle-XIIe siècle): Le modèle insulaire,” in L'image: Fonctions et usages des images dans l'Occident médiéval, ed. J. Baschet and J.-C. Schmitt (Paris, 1997), 185-219. 32 See “Visual Culture Questionnaire,” October 77 (1996), 25-70. R. Dekoninck, “Un conflit de valeurs: L’histoire de l’art aux prises avec les Visual Studies," in L'art en valeurs, ed. R. Dekoninck and D. Lories (Paris, 2011), 341-55. 33 Bartholeyns and Golsenne, “Une théorie des actes d’images” (as in note 24), 23. 34 Freedberg, The Power of Images (as in note 18), 110. 35 Freedberg, The Power of Images (as in note 18), 120. 36 Freedberg, The Power of Images (as in note 18), 110.

37 T. Golsenne, “Parure et culte,” in La Performance des images (as in note 24), 74. 38 Schmitt, Le Corps des images (as in note 13), 284. 39 Golsenne, “Parure et culte” (as in note 37), 82. 40 Golsenne, “Parure et culte” (as in note 37), 83. 41 M. Augé, Le Dieu objet (Paris, 1988), 30-33. 42 J. Baschet, “Inventivité et sérialité des images médiévales: Pour une approche iconographique élargie,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 51 (1996), 106. 43 J. Baschet, “Images en acte et agir social,” in La Performance des images (as in note 24), 13.

14 Classifying Image Content in Visual Collections A selective history Chiara Franceschini

The origins and reasons for iconographie classification Even though earlier attempts, many of which are discussed in this publication, had been made to look at art historical subject matter and its classification, it was not by chance that iconography, as well as its classification, first started to develop in the field of Christian art. Iconography developed as a science based on the idea of a close correspondence between image and text. In Christian cultures the text is chiefly the sacred history as told in texts such as the Bible. Although art historians have always been aware of the autonomy of the visual, the close and problematic links between a text such as the Bible and the rendering in images of the Historia Sacra provided the basis for the birth of iconography as a science. Christian authors have always shown a certain tendency to tell artists what they were supposed to do. According to this way of thinking, and highlighted by the famous

dictum of Gregory the Great about the function of images as books for the illiterate, Christian iconography was conceived as a form of visible theology.1 The dependence on texts is evident in the approaches of the early iconographers. For example, Émile Mâle, who coined the term “iconography” in 1927 and later rediscovered Cesare Ripa’s Iconology, employed the medieval treatise Speculum Majus of Vincent of Beauvais to organize his book L’art réligieux de XlIIe siècle en France. As early as 1891, when trying to choose a subject for his thesis, Mâle wrote to a fellow student, “I just found a topic for my Latin dissertation: Michelangelo as a theologian. I will try to demonstrate that Michelangelo did not invent a single thing in the Sistine Chapel, but that he very closely followed Augustine’s City ofGod.”Between the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, the idea of iconography as a tendentially encyclopedic discipline that could potentially bring back images to their written sources was reflected in the endeavors to fund and organize art historical photographic collections according to subject categories. Due to practical necessities, the iconographie arrangement of these visual archives established a unique relationship between image and text. However, iconographers very soon realized that it is one thing to classify images according to the text or source which is supposed to be behind them, but it is another thing to classify images according to subject matter. In 1939, iconography was authoritatively described as “that branch of the history of art which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of works of art.”- Even more interesting is the definition given thirteen years later by Creighton Gilbert, according to which iconography “tends to be simply the identifying of subject matter for cataloguing purposes.”- However, this “identification of subject matter for cataloguing purposes” had already led to the foundation of visual resources such as the Witt Library, the Frick Library, or the Index of Christian Art in Princeton, and was clearly not that simple.

Subject matter (e.g., “Virgin and child”) is certainly a notion that is not exclusively text-related. The subject of a picture may refer to a type, without depending on any written text; however, a subject always needs to be described in words. Accordingly, this always reestablishes a relationship with a text, even if the text now comes not before (as in the case of a source) but after the image, in the form of an accurate description of the subject itself. It was, in fact, in relation to the notion of subject that the first objections to iconographie classification were raised, as for example by Robert Klein, in his 1963 publication Thoughts of Iconography, where he states, It is not always possible to establish a non-equivocal correspondence between a figurative work and its “subject.” Consider, for instance, a painting of the 1880s representing the corner of a room, a man in an armchair reading the Journal des Débats, a mantlepiece with a Louis XV clock and a vase of flowers, a mirror on the wall, part of a window, and so on. Of all these objects, which is the “true subject” of the picture?-

Klein was dealing here with postmedieval art; but it is equally possible to wonder whether this question makes sense for medieval art as well. While attacking Panofsky’s iconology, whose preferred field seemed to be Renaissance art, Gilbert also wrote that “if the Middle Ages have a more public and standardized set of symbols, amenable to the simpler attack of iconography, later periods show a well-known tendency to loosen or dispense with associative values.”- Certainly, iconographers dealing with the classification of Renaissance images tend to find more and more examples outside iconographie classification.2 However, the fundamental question is to what extent it is possible to use words to describe, arrange, and retrieve the content of images and that remains valid for all periods, never mind the problem of how to establish continuities and breaks between different periods in relation to iconographie classification. Beyond the focus on Christian material in the early days of iconography as a discipline, there were also other endeavors to

classify images by content. The idea of using tree structures to classify image content may have developed from descriptive and classificatory systems used in botany and zoology. However, the problem with iconography (as distinct from zoography or geography) is always the need not only to describe and classify images by their morphologies but also to bring the image or object back to a text, whether that is a source or a textual description. In this sense, iconography is not merely a system for the classification of forms and types but rather a semiotic system for the classification of forms and types. Before as well as after the invention of photography, the greatest stimulus for creating icono-graphic systems came from scholarship and the market. Scholars and theorists dealing with the visual in art history as well as in a number of other fields, such as history, philosophy, anthropology, literary history, theology, and psychology, frequently have queries as to how a certain text or subject is depicted in art. Image collections that offered this research possibility, especially before the advent of the Internet, proved to be extremely useful for practitioners in these fields. These collections allowed the researcher to know not only how subjects were depicted in art but also where and when.Beyond the academic world, iconographic classification proved to be useful for a variety of different motives. At least from the sixteenth century, image buyers and sellers have often needed subject classification systems which allowed speedy retrieval (e.g., for collectors, for use in the world of advertising, or for other commercial or noncommercial enterprises). An early example that relates to both theological and commercial needs is provided by an album, which was assembled in Rome between 1560 and 1600 by the French publisher Lafrery, and is now in Madrid. As noted by Zahira Veliz Bomford, the Madrid album, which includes more than three hundred prints, “is arranged according to iconography, with Old Testament subjects, then New Testament, followed by the Evangelists, the Fathers of the Church, Saints, devotional images, and finally post-Tridentine formulae for the seven

sacraments, and so on.”- Here, the classification works by arrangement and not by labeling; it is possible to see that this order made it easier for artists or patrons to find an authoritative depiction of a certain religious subject - authoritative because Lafrery intended to make engraved reproductions by the most famous Renaissance artists of the Historia Sacra. These were to be issued in Rome and made available to a larger public. When images became plentiful, as happened after the invention of photography, iconographic arrangement alone did not suffice to retrieve an image quickly. It was essential to have a coherent system of searchable texts (descriptions or card index). It is only very recently that web search engines are trying to move from the use of words to describe images to a different system based on image-recognition software.

The triumph of iconographic classification in the analog era The greatest impulse to iconographic classification in the art historical world coincided with the widespread use of photography as the main working media for the art historian. It was only when art historians had access to an amount of photographic images that it became necessary to devise systems of organization, which sometimes followed an iconographic principle. These collections and archives, developed by either single scholars or institutions, were all started toward the end of the nineteenth century and in the first three decades of the twentieth - that is, during the age when photography was being established as a research tool. As already mentioned, the Index of Christian Art was established at Princeton University, in 1917, initially as the personal archive of Charles Rufus Morey. This was not the only initiative in the field of medieval iconography at the time, but it

soon became the most influential. Initially, the Index covered art only up to the year 700, but the scope was extended before Morey’s death to 1400.— The Index is formed by two physical files: a text file, consisting of “over one million color-coordinated cards that are arranged under 28,000 subject headings” organized alphabetically, and a photographic file, “consisting of over 200,000 re-photographs of works of art.” The “text file” is most important for iconography: since the foundation in 1917, it not only records metadata for each image but also offers a “free-text description in which individual details of the particular work are recorded.” The vocabulary of this free-text description is consistent: it is “very much controlled as is the descriptive format in which the image is read.”— In other words, a parallel between image and text is clearly established - the text, which was not searchable in the paper files, is meant to offer a way of reading the image as objectively as possible. The level of detail offered by the Index of Christian Art proved to be most useful in the age of computerization, when all the information on paper was converted to a digital format. In 1908, in Paris, Jacques Doucet started to collect photographic materials, covering medieval art as well. The attempt to follow scientific rules to classify Doucet’s photothèque is documented as early as 1930, thanks to the input of Clotilde Brière-Misme, a collaborator of Doucet since 1919. Under an overarching alphabetic classification of artist, the organization followed a subject classification in the following order: Bible (following the order of the books), religious allegories, saints, mythology and allegory, history, literature, portraits, figures (heads, clothed figures, etc.), genre paintings, landscapes and towns, animals, interiors with no figure, still life, and copies and fakes.— Seventy thousand photographs were classified using such a structure from 1930 to 1936: the aim was to compete with “les plus parfaits organisations étrangères de ce genre,”— which must have included the Index of Christian Art and possibly (unless the influence did not go in the other direction, which is not possible to establish at present) the

archive in the Warburg Institute, in Hamburg, which was later moved to London and which was being developed at this time. From the late 1920s while in Hamburg, Aby Warburg started to work on Mnemosyne, his atlas project: one of the first occasions to present his visual approach and use of photography to fellow art historians was provided in 1927, when he gave a lecture on the Valois tapestries at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence - the same city where, about forty years earlier, he had started to collect books and photographs. Still in the late 1920s, together with Fritz Saxl and with the practical help of many young scholars and assistants, including Edgar Breitenbach, Warburg formulated a plan for both the book and the image collection of his library: this plan was systematized and recorded in a scheme by Saxl around 1930-1931.— In 1931, Erwin Panofsky, who at the time was teaching in Hamburg and was part of the group of intellectuals in the Warburg circle, visited the Index of Christian Art for the first time.— That same year, when writing “On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Art,” Panofsky formulated the first version of his three-level scheme for describing and interpreting works of visual art - a classificatory system which later came to be described as pre-iconography, iconography, and iconology.— In 1933, the Warburg Library moved to London: at this point, the Index of Christian Art was a model for the reorganization of its photographic collection, which, at the time, was under the direction of Rudolf Wittkower (1901-1971). The new arrangement incorporated elements of the iconographic sections first classified by Saxl.— Today, the Warburg Institute Photographic Collection consists of an estimated four hundred thousand photographs of works of art, mostly dating from classical antiquity to the eighteenth century. The photographs are mostly collected in folders and subfolders, corresponding to the breakdown of a theme or subject in subcategories according to different principles, sometimes referring back to a text, but other times not (e.g.,

“Amor” - “Allegories” - “The power of Amor” or “Old Testament” - “Genesis” - “Adam and Eve” - “Adam single figure”).— In turn, the thematic folders are stored in filing cabinets grouped together in bays, with an indication of the main subject categories: PreClassical Iconography, Antiquities, Rituals, Gods and Myths, Classical Literature, Mediaeval and Later Literature, Magic and Science, Gestures, Secular Iconography, Portraits, History, Social Life, Religious Iconography, and so forth.— Unlike the Index of Christian Art, the textual description is kept to a minimum, and the classification is entrusted not to a card index or to exhaustive textual descriptions but to the material disposition in space itself combined with minimal but essential information provided on the back of photographs. Flexible and not systematic, this organization has the advantage of stimulating “serendipity,” sometimes confronting the user with unexpected discoveries.— Earlier enterprises, such as the Index of Christian Art and the Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, influenced the organization of visual resources, which developed around the Warburg Library in Hamburg and then at the Warburg Institute in London. In turn, the thematic/iconographic approach to organizing photographic material, which was developed by succeeding generations of Warburgians, had a great impact on other projects. Thanks to Edgar Breitenbach, a strand of Warburgianism was infused into the project to classify the photographs of American life in the Depression era carried out under the Farm Security Administration at the Library of Congress from 1945.— In the commercial field, the image bank created by Otto Bettmann in Hamburg is another interesting case. The extent to which Bettmann’s “subject eyes” were indebted to the Hamburg school is uncertain; however, with Bettmann having studied history and art history at the University of Leipzig from 1923 to 1927, it is highly probable that he became acquainted with contemporary debates on iconography. One of his advisors, the historian of economics and culture Alfred Doren (1869-1934), was one of Aby Warburg’s close friends and colleagues.—

Although not strictly art historical, other projects from the same period are noteworthy, as they can be considered, in one way or another, to be linked or at least comparable to those developed around the school of Hamburg-London. Around 1931-1932, Henry Balfour (1863-1939), curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, created a systematic archive out of the collection of ethnographic photographs he had collected for the museum. The result was a thematic series of boxes, which were intended to provide a cross-cultural research tool. This archive raises questions about the legacy of cultural comparativism. Put in context with cognate projects - and in particular with the Warburg collection - Balfour’s classification system has been recently read within a “wider universalizing archival movement of the inter-war period.”— A further example of this momentum is provided by the “Eranos Archiv,” the photographic collection of Jungian archetypes developed by Olga Frobe-Kapteyn (1881-1962) according to the system of Jungian symbolism represented in the visual arts. From 1935, she corresponded with Fritz Saxl and visited the Warburg Photographic Collection several times. The photographic archive, which grew out of Eranos meetings during the early 1930s, was established and used for traveling exhibitions. Somehow unaware of the fundamental difference in scope between her collection and the Warburg Photographic Collection, in 1955, Frobe-Kapteyn donated her original “collection of art historical photographs for education/learning” to the Warburg Institute.— In 1936, William Heckscher (1904-1999), a pupil of Panofsky’s, worked with Dora Panofsky (1885-1965), his first wife, on a collection of “Pathos formulae”: this rich photographic collection followed him to Utrecht, where a copy of the Index of Christian Art is preserved and where, during the 1950s, Heckscher developed an “index iconologicus.”— In 1951, Henri van de Waal, who had been in contact with several members of the Warburg Institute since the 1930s, wrote to Gertrud Bing (1892-1964) about his work on a “icono-graphical

index which could provide a directrix for the filling of iconographical material,” asking permission “to test (its) system at the practice of your collections to make sure that no important items have been left out.”— This was the beginning of Iconclass - a project which has since focused on the classification of subject matter using alphanumeric taxonomies and has now became a standard for iconographic description. Iconclass, however, differs from the other projects mentioned so far because it was not initiated to arrange a collection of physical images, but was developed independently as a pure classificatory system. Although historically interconnected, these different case studies show different ways of arranging textual and visual material and data within the image archive of the analog era. There are cases of thematically organizing the archive and the card index, corresponding to a typological-topographical arrangement of the image (the Index of Christian Art). In other instances, miniature photos are attached to the card index (the Bettmann Archive). Elsewhere, it is possible to appreciate the value of a material arrangement, which corresponds spatially to the thematic logic of the system and physically acts as a visual index. Such is the case of the Warburg Institute Photographic Collection, where information derives directly from the photographs and their physical location, and only incidentally with the help of a card index; such is the case of the attributes of the saints, for which a partial card index is available. Sometimes the cataloguers’ ideal target was to provide a virtually comprehensive visual catalogue of all the possible images or depicted subjects of a given culture, or cultural context. For example, in the 1930s, the Warburgians set out to complete and arrange “as far and as systematically as possible” their “iconographical collection” of all the medieval and Renaissance visual materials related to the history of the classical tradition in religion, art, literature, and science.— This was only one of the phases of the history of the collection and its classification system. Another telling example of the endeavor to classify and organize

an entire culture through its images is provided by the American Life in the Depression Era Project, as envisioned by Edgar Breitenbach. In both cases the attempts to offer a complete visual documentation in relation to a culture go beyond textual reference and research needs: here the effort is to classify cultures through images.— In the field of art history, the iconographie or thematic classification principle was not the only one. The standard art historical photographic archive could follow a different pattern. At the Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florenz, for example, the iconographie classification was entrusted to a subject crossreference index, while the overarching arrangement followed a typological scheme (architecture, sculpture, applied arts, painting) and, subordinately, a stylistic arrangement, such as “Romanesque,” “Gothic,” “Renaissance,” “Baroque,” and “Classicism.”—

Challenges of the digital era From a theoretical point of view, all of the examples discussed earlier are concerned with one central question: how to use language to classify and retrieve the content of images for a specific purpose. One of the central notions of classification is the concept of keyword. Willingly or not, our googlified world is dominated by the practice of looking for contents by keyword searches. Google defines its mission as follows: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”— Of course, the realm of images is a subset of the world’s information. Still, the problem of retrieving the content of images is so complex that it has not yet been completely resolved - even by the developers and programmers of Google. At the center of this problem lies the relationship between word and image. Pattern recognition technology, though promising, is not yet fully

developed, and it is still through keywords that Google Images allows users to search the web for image content. If we look back to the old, specialized analog archives of photographs mentioned earlier, we can appreciate what refined tools were developed by archivists, curators, and art historians before the digital era, and in particular before the era of the page rank algorithms which are at the heart of the Google’s domination, first of the web and then of advertising (through the practice of content-targeted advertising). As we have seen in the cases discussed, the choice of keywords depends on logic and functions of each collection. Beginning in the 1990s, the digital conversion of many analog archives, and especially those specializing in art history, has brought about further research in classifying iconographic material. Iconclass, the Index of Christian Art, the KHI Digital Photo Library, the Photo Archive of the Fondazione Federico Zeri, the Warburg Institute Iconographic Database, the Photographic Archive of Villa I Tatti, the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, the Census of Antique Art and Architecture Known to the Renaissance in Berlin (one of the most important digital enterprise for Renaissance art), and the various projects developed at the Getty Research Institute, not to mention the digital research tools currently developed by many of the world’s museums, are expanding the materials and research possibilities available to scholars in the fields of medieval and Renaissance art. Large-scale projects which are useful for iconographic research include Artstor, a digital image library funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation in the late 1990s, and Wikimedia Commons. Available by subscription to many institutions for educational purposes, Artstor includes today more than 1.9 million images from many different repositories (including some of the ones listed earlier).— All these projects offer new tools for iconographic or thematic image research, which are both rooted in their respective analog history and much more refined and useful than what Google Images is able to offer at present. In this wider and progressively interconnected picture, where

digital tools are offering new perspectives for art history,— the question needs to be asked about the future of iconography and iconographic classification, beyond mere usefulness and practicalities. The world now has visuality at its center as has never happened before, and it is clear that image and text work in different ways and are completely different media. The classic methodology of iconography, with its strong tendency to anchor image to text, if not to a source, and to a subject matter (described either with a text or a simple textual label), needs to be rethought. The study of how types, forms, subjects, and themes migrate from one image to another and from one cultural context to another may give a historical and geographical depth to the study and understanding of images. Moving from approaches that tended to rely on textual sources, today’s art historians tend to focus more and more on the proper visual elements of art. Without sounding too paradoxical, it may be possible to say that we are today assisting in a visual turn in art history. Thanks to all the work that has already been done, as dwarfs on the shoulders of the giants of past generations, we may now attempt to focus on the study of proper visual elements and visual evidence (and not just material evidence as in the recently fashionable material turn) offered by the images themselves. For this new turn in the field of art history a new iconography with new tools is needed. The new iconographic classification by themes such as animal iconography, color, light, and music/sound as offered by this publication is certainly the first step toward it.

Notes 1 Gregory the Great, Registrum epistolarum tomus II, libri VIII-XIV, in Monumenta Germaniae Histórica, ed. P. Ewald and L.M. Hartmann (Berlín, 1899), 195, IX, 208.

2 “Je viens de trouver le sujet de ma these latine: Michel-Ange théologien. J’essaierai de montrer qu’il n’y a dans la Sixtine aucune donnée qui soit de l’invention de Michel-Ange, et qui’il a suivi de très près la Cité de Dieu de Saint-Augustine”: G. Giustiniani, “Gli esordi critici di Emile Mâle: le tesi in latino sulle sibille,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome - Moyen Âge, 125/2 (2013), 585-620, esp. 585-86. 3 E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York, 1939), 3. 4 C. Gilbert, “On Subject and Not-Subject in Italian Renaissance Pictures,” The Art Bulletin, 34, 3 (1952), 202-16, 202. 5 R. Klein, “Thoughts of Iconography,” in Form and Meaning: Essays on the Renaissance and Modern Art, trans. M. Jay and L. Wieseltier (New York, 1963), 143. 6 Gilbert, “Subject and Not-Subject” (as in note 4), 202. 7 Examples may be found, for example, in the Photographic Collection of the Warburg Institute. For a possible critical development of this point see A. Nagel and L. Pericolo (ed.), Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art (Farnham, 2010). 8 Just to mention only one of the many possible examples, see M. Meiss, “Scholarship and Penitence in the Early Renaissance: The Image of St. Jerome,” in Id., The Painter’s Choice: Problems in the Interpretation of Renaissance Art (New York, 1976), 190 and 198, n. 7, where he establishes that the image of Jerome in the wilderness, which was previously supposed to be a medieval subject, is, on the contrary, “extremely rare” before 1400, since “no example is listed by the Index of Christian Art, which classifies subjects to 1400.” 9 Z. Veliz Bomford, “The Authority of Prints in Early Modern Spain,” Hispanic Research Journal 9:5 (2008), 416-36, 425. 10 C.P. Hourihane, “Classifying Subject Matter in Medieval Art: The Index of Christian Art at Princeton University,” in C. Franceschini and K. Mazzucco (eds.), “Classifying Content: Photographic Collections and Theories of Thematic Ordering,” Visual Resources 30:3 (2014), 255-62, esp. 256. Most of what follows in this paragraph is taken from the

introduction to the aforementioned special issue of Visual Resources (as in note 24). 11 Hourihane, “Classifying Subject Matter in Medieval Art” (as in note 10), 258. 12 See “Le fonds photographique: La photothèque de Jacques Doucet: passé, présent, avenir,” Les Nouvelles de l’INHA 15 (June 2003), 2-5, in particular p. 4. 13 Doucet (as in note 12), p. 4. 14 K. Mazzucco, “On the Reverse. Some Notes on Photographie Images from the Warburg Institute Photographic Collection,” Aisthesis 2 (2012), 21732. 15 I. Ragusa, “Observation on the History of the Index,” in C. Hourihane (ed.), “The Princeton Index of Christian Art,” Visual Resources 13:3-4 (1998), 243. 16 On the development of this scheme see J. Eisner and K. Lorenz, “The Genesis of Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 38:3 (2012), 483-512. On the relations between Panofsky’s theory and the Index of Christian Art see Hourihane, “Classifying Subject Matter in Medieval Art” (as in note 10), 259. 17 K. Mazzucco, “(Photographic) Subject-Matter: Fritz Saxl Indexing Mnemosyne - A Stratigraphy of the Warburg Institute Photographic Collection’s System,” in Franceschini and Mazzucco, “Classifying Content” (as in note 10), 201-21. 18

A

complete

subject

index

is

available

at

http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/photographic-collection/subject-index. 19 See the website of the Warburg Institute Photographic Collection and R. Duits, “A New Resource Based on Old Principles: The Warburg Institute Iconographie Database,” in Franceschini and Mazzucco, “Classifying Content” (as in note 10), 263-75, 263-66. 20 Duits, “A New Resource” (as in note 19), 266. 21 E. Sears, “American Iconography: Assessing FSA Photographs,” in

Franceschini and Mazzucco, “Classifying Content” (as in note 10), 23954. 22 E. Blaschke, “The Bettmann Archive and the Commodification of Images”, in Franceschini and Mazzucco, “Classifying Content” (as in note 10), 222-39, quotation on p. 230. 23

C.

Morton,

“Photography

and

the

Comparative

Method:

The

Construction of an Anthropological Archive,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18:2 (June 2012), 369-96, p. 369. 24 Franceschini and Mazzucco, “Introduction,” in Franceschini and Mazzucco “Classifying Content” (as in note 10), 175-76, and R. Bernardini, “Tracce: Jung e l’Archivio di Eranos,” in Jung a Eranos: il progetto della psicologia complessa (Milan, 2011), 247-353. 25 E. Sears, “The Life and Work of Willliam S. Heckscher: Some Petit Perceptions,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 53:1 (1990), 107-34. 26 Franceschini and Mazzucco, “Classifying Content” (as in note 10), 176. 27 Franceschini and Mazzucco, “Classifying Content” (as in note 10), 173. 28 For a philosophical insight into this type of approach, although relating to earlier periods, see P. Giacomoni, “Classificare per immagini,” Annuario 28 (2012), 301-21. 29 U. Derkcs, “‘And because the use of the photographic device is impossible without a proper card catalog ...’: The Typological-Stylistic Arrangement and the Subject Cross-Reference Index of the KHI’s Phototek (l897-1930s),” in Franceschini and Mazzucco “Classifying Content” (as in note 10), 181-200. 30 J. Gleick, “How Google Dominates Us,” The New York Review of Books, August 18 (2011). 31 See at http://www.artstor.org/mission. 32 See, for example, the dedicated program at the Getty Institute: http://www.getty.edu/foundation/initiatives/current/dah/index.html.

15

Library of Congress Subject Headings Sherman Clarke

The Library of Congress (LC) collection is comprehensive and universal by topic, format, language, and audience level; it serves as the national library of the United States, though it reports specifically to the US Congress. It considers itself a comprehensive public library rather than a research or special library. The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) system developed in the era of the card catalog, long before the influence of computerization and web browsing led us to think of searching by discrete terms or single words isolated from their context and function for access to resources. LCSH is universal in coverage, primarily in American English, and aims to use language that can be comprehended by a large and diverse audience.- It is not a specialized vocabulary, though it is used by many research collections, such as the Morgan Library, Harvard University, Getty Research Institute, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Terms are based on literary warrant - that is, all terms are developed because they are needed for a work being catalogued. LCSH is not a fully realized thesaurus as not all broader, narrower, and related terms are connected by references. LCSH terminology may be freely searched on the LC site at http://authorities.loc. gov. In the card catalog, it was important for a subject heading string

to include all aspects of the particular topic. The subject heading may be a single word, but “string” is here being used to refer to the entire subject heading, which may consist of several words making up a main topic or concept and various subdivisions. One might have a topic subdivided by subtopic, geography, chronology, and/or form - for example, Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint Apparitions and miracles - France - History - 19th century; Hundred Years’ War, 1339-1453 - Campaigns - France - Limousin - Exhibitions. To save typing in the card era as well as the inevitable typographical errors, there was a limit to the number of subject headings that would be applied to any particular title. It should be remembered that LCSH terms are mostly built for books, which can indeed be on specialized topics but are not generally as specific as journal articles or single images may be. They also mostly aim at access to the topical content of the book. Still, the terms can be used to describe what is depicted in a single image or work of art. The Morgan Library, for example, catalogues both its collection material and reference material in the same Corsair catalog. The search result for “Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint - Art” includes both representations of the Virgin and books about the topic. The Prints & Photographs Division of LC has developed the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (TGM), which largely uses terms that are also in LCSH in the same form.- Some indexes to periodicals use LCSH, modified LCSH, or LCSH-like headings for the particular field covered by the index.- Most libraries use the LCSH terminology as published according to documented policies and procedures. Subject cataloguing and classification guidelines in each discipline or field of knowledge were developed by the LC subject or language team that catalogued those books, following general principles. Cataloguers at the Library of Congress were assigned and specialized in either descriptive or subject cataloguing, or in another area, such as serial publications or Dewey decimal classification, as well as being language specialists. This led to some variation in practice about subdivision order and to varying

patterns in different classification schedules. Class N is the main class for the visual arts, though photography is classified in TR. Other areas which are now commonly collected by art and architecture libraries are also found outside N. City planning may be in HT or elsewhere in the social sciences; cultural geography is in G with other geography; landscape design is in SB with agriculture. Iconography, by its very nature, may fall pretty much in any class, from religion to history to the social sciences. Regardless, the subject headings used to provide access will adhere to LCSH guidelines. Until the 1970s and 1980s, most cataloguers in the United States applied LC subject headings by using the printed version (bound in red and known as the Red Books) or seeing how they appeared on cards distributed by LC. A letter to LC policy experts could provide an explanation of a particular subject heading or string. Cooperative cataloguing programs, a new edition of the AngloAmerican cataloguing rules in 1979, and computerization brought many changes to the cataloguing world and the place of the Library of Congress within that world. LC certainly retained, and retains, its central role but there are strong cooperative programs, such as NACO and SACO, for name and subject cooperation respectively. As stated earlier, LCSH terminology is freely available and searchable on the LC site at http://authorities.loc.gov. LC held a subject heading workshop in the early 1980s, and the training materials for that workshop developed into the publicly available manual now known as the Subject Headings Manual. It contains general instructions for constructing subject headings, general patterns, patterns specific to particular types of headings, free-floating subdivisions, and memos (as they are called) about particular topics, such as geographic features, extinct cities, classes of persons, city sections, fine arts, buildings, pictorial works, biblical topics, religious groups, and mythological characters. The manual is now available online.- Though aimed at cataloguers, some of the instructions may be of benefit to the researcher in

determining how to search for a topic. Pattern headings are those that provide guidance on similar headings. If a subdivision or practice is established under the pattern heading, it can be applied to similar headings without explicit authorization. For example, subdivisions under Shakespeare can be applied to other authors. Subdivisions under “English language,” “French language,” and “Romance languages” can be applied to other languages and language groups. “Art, Italian” is the pattern for art headings, along with “Art, Chinese [Japanese, Korean]” for headings particular to their Asian context. Free-floating subdivisions are those that can be applied in LCSH without explicit authorization. For example, the subdivision “History” can be applied to a wide variety of headings. Other freefloating subdivisions can be applied to types of headings, such as individual persons, classes of persons, ethnic groups, individual corporate bodies, types of corporate bodies, animals, industries, disciplines, and activities (Plate 2). A conference on subject subdivisions was held in 1991 at Airlie House in Airlie, Virginia, and is thus known as the Airlie House Conference.- The conference built on studies of subdivisions at LC and by subcommittees of the Subject Analysis Committee (SAC), the principal committee of the American Library Association looking at subject access to library materials. Based on the studies and the conference papers and discussion, the conference made several recommendations, which began to be implemented by LC by the mid-1990s. Similar subdivisions have

Plate 2 Trinity of Saint Anne with donor, Atelier of the Master of Rabenden, polychrome wood, c. 1515, Unter den Linden Museum, Colmar (89.3.1). Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane LCSH: Note: The Anne-Mary-Jesus trio is not established in LCSH. ICONOGRAPHY Anne (Mother of the Virgin Mary), Saint - Art Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint - Art Jesus Christ - Art

Patrons in art Pomegranate in art HEADINGS OTHER THAN ICONOGRAPHY Sculpture, German - Germany - Munich - 16th century Polychromy - Germany - Munich - 16th century Meister von Rabenden, active 1510-1525, Studio of

been harmonized when the meaning was the same or substantially similar in intent and usage. For example, “Description” was applied to cities and other local places and “Description and travel” was applied to nations and other larger places; the subdivision for all places was conflated to “Description and travel.” Order of subdivisions was regularized so that the order is “topic - topical subdivision - geographic subdivision - chronological subdivision - form subdivision.” Form and genre were to be separately coded to differentiate them from topical information. Geographic subdivision was to be more comprehensively and consistently applied. More subject headings built on patterns were to be explicitly established. The pattern “[topic] in art” became one of the patterns which is explicitly established rather than applied in a free-floating manner. This is primarily because it is a phrase heading, where explicit authorization is important, versus a subdivision, where the main topic and subdivision can be authorized separately. A change to subject headings for art materials also resulted from the conference and its follow-through. Chronology had been handled in a way that resulted in two subject headings, such as “Painting, German” and “Painting, Modern - 17th-18th centuries Germany.” This was simplified by allowing for chronological subdivision of “Painting, German,” resulting in the single string “Painting, German - 17th century” (and/or 18th century, as warranted) (Fig. 15.1). Maintenance of cataloguing records is a significant effort, though it is somewhat easier in current computerized catalogues

than it was in the card catalog. The difficulty of changing cards led to reluctance in modernizing headings, which would affect potentially many thousands of cards. Since current practice in US libraries generally involves each library maintaining its own catalogues, changes in subject headings mean that catalogue records around the bibliographic world will vary in their adherence to current LCSH terminology. The central database WorldCat maintained by OCLC is regularly updated and revised based on changes in subjects and names as well as advances in machine manipulation of records and clustering of records from diverse sources. Authority vendors offer similar services to individual libraries to revise records. Still, individual library databases may vary in their currency. Geographic subdivision is now consistently applied, though the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom are subdivided through first-order subdivision (state, province, constituent country) rather than nation. Early on, famous places such as Paris and London were subdivided directly. Now, all local places are subdivided indirectly through a larger geographic entity. Geographic entities larger than a nation or that straddle nations or states are subdivided directly. The only exception now to the indirect subdivision practice is Jerusalem and that is for political reasons - for example, Painting, Gothic - England - London; Architecture, Romanesque - Europe, Central; Psalters - Germany - Reichenau (Baden-Württemberg); Psalters - Macedonia (Republic); Sculpture, Romanesque - Meuse River Valley; Temples - Jerusalem; Temples, Khmer - Cambodia - Angkor (Extinct city). The form of names used in geographic subdivisions is based on the Name Authority File, which in turn is based on the cataloguing rules (now Resource Description and Access or RDÄ). Nonjurisdictional geographic names, such as bodies of water and regions, are established in LCSH and can be used as warranted in geographic subdivision. Based on the relevant rules and policies, most places are established in English and are the modern (current) name for the place.

Chronological subdivision is fairly specific for historic periods and events but is generally not more specific than century elsewhere. The century may be preceded by the subdivision “History,” which can also appear without a specific period subdivision - for example, France - History - Louis IV, 936-954; Peasants - France - Social life and customs - 16th century; Peasants - Germany - History - 16th century; Pilgrims and pilgrimages - Middle East - History. Style terms such as “Gothic” are generally not subdivided by chronology but may be combined with other subject strings that include chronology - for example, Art, Gothic - France; Art, French - 14th century; Architecture, Romanesque - France - Burgundy; Architecture - France Burgundy - History - 12th century. Note that “Art” and “Architecture” have different patterns for chronological and geographic subdivision (unfortunately). Art is specified by a national or other adjective in inverted order; the century is applied directly following any local place subdivision. Architecture may have style adjectives in inverted order but is subdivided by place and then “-History” and then the century. “Christian art and symbolism” is chronologically subdivided at an era level - for example, Christian art and symbolism - Medieval, 500-1500; Christian art and symbolism - Modern period, 1500-. A place subdivision may be inserted before the chronological subdivision for example, Christian art and symbolism - Croatia - Dalmatia Medieval period, 500-1500.

Figure 15.1 Christ being nailed to the cross, Gerhard Remsich, c. 1538-9, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (c. 276-1928). Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane LCSH: Nailing of Christ to the Cross - V&A Note: The denial and betrayal are both set up in LCSH and presumably any of the Passion steps could be established. The “wealth of domestic detail” could be noted in detail but probably would not, in practice, go as far as these examples, though the headings do show some variety in how the strings would be constructed.

ICONOGRAPHY Jesus Christ - Passion - Art Holy Cross in art Carpenters in art Carpentry - Tools - Pictorial works Jerusalem - In art Saints in art HEADINGS OTHER THAN ICONOGRAPHY Glass painting and staining - Germany - Steinfeld (North RhineWestphalia) - 16th century Steinfeld (Premonstratensian abbey) [established by earlier cataloguing rules; current rules would probably call for Abtei Steinfeld (Steinfeld, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany)] Remsich, Gerhard, active 1522-1543 [he is not yet in LC/Names or ULAN]

Individual works of art and names of individual artists are established in the Name Authority File. Artworks are established under the artist or title as appropriate, usually in English. Artists and artworks can be used in LCSH but are not combined with topical subject headings. Rather, they would appear in distinct subject strings and can be subdivided according to patterns and other instructions - for example, Gislebertus, active 12th century Adaptations; Book of Kells - Fiction; Giotto, 12667-1337. Crucifix (Padua, Italy). Subject access would be given in separate subject heading strings - for example, Sculpture, Romanesque - France Autun; Sculpture, French - France - Autun - 12th century. Iconography is handled in a variety of ways. One principal way that LCSH deals with topical subjects is “[topic] in art” headings. Topics are generally expressed in the plural, following thesaurus standards for objects. Concepts are generally expressed in the singular. The topics or concepts are generally also established without the "... in art” extension for iconographie treatments - for example: Unicorns in art; Birds in art; Architecture in art;

Buildings in art; Holy Cross in art; Distress (Psychology) in art. “[Topic] in art” headings are not subdivided by place or time period. Such a heading can be combined with other subject headings to cover place or time. For example, representations of flowers in Ghent-Bruges manuscripts would be covered by “Flowers in art” and headings such as “Illumination of books and manuscripts, Flemish - Belgium - Ghent - 15th century” and “Illumination of books and manuscripts, Flemish - Belgium Bruges - 15th century.” For named entities such as corporate bodies, places, and works, the subdivision “- In art” can be applied - for example, Musée du Louvre - In art; Florence (Italy) - In art; Bible - In art. Representations of premodern persons as well as deities and mythological and legendary persons are subdivided by “- Art.” Topics that are topically subdivided can also be subdivided by “Art” - for example, Hercules (Roman mythological character) Art; Sebastian, Saint - Art; Holy Cross - Legends - Art. Modern (after 1400 or thereabouts) persons and families can be subdivided by “- Portraits” - for example, Marie, de Médicis, Queen, consort of Henry IV, King of France, 1573-1642 - Portraits; Medici, House of - Portraits. Other subdivisions, such as “Family” or “- Travel,” are applied to either premodern or modern persons and can be further subdivided by “- Portraits.” “Portraits” can also be applied to classes of persons - for example, Henry II, King of England, 1133-1189 - Family - Portraits; Emperors Rome - Family - Portraits. Places and other topics may also be subdivided by “- Pictorial works.” It should be stated that, theoretically, “Pictorial works” is about the nature of the work being catalogued, not the contents of the work. This is similar to “[topic] in art” but a book could be about dogs in art without being a “pictorial work”- - for example, Paris (France) - Pictorial works; Africans - Pictorial works; Animals - France - Pictorial works; Architecture, Greek Mediterranean Region - Pictorial works. Also, when a topic is already subdivided by place or other aspect, “in art” would not be

appended for an iconographic treatment - for example, Birds Ireland - Pictorial works. Subdivisions such as “- Pictorial works” are applied to all of the relevant subject heading strings on a work being catalogued. This is particularly true of genre/form terms but is also the case with some geographic and chronological subdivisions. Individual literary and other works as well as individual authors and classes of literature may be divided by “- Illustrations” - for example, Beowulf - Illustrations; Dante Alighieri, 1265- 1321. Divina commedia - Illustrations; Catholic Church. Gradual Illustrations; Charlemagne, Emperor, 742-814 - Legends Illustrations. For wars, the subdivision “- Art and the war” is applied to the topic - for example: Trojan War - Art and the war; Napoleonic Wars, 1800-1815 - Art and the wars. Usually when the war heading is subdivided, the subdivision “- Pictorial works” will be used instead of “Art and the war” - for example, Napoleonic Wars, 1800-1815 - Campaigns - Italy - Pictorial works (Fig. 15.2).

Figure 1F2 Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, Western façade of the Abbey Church of St.-Gilles-du-Gard, c. 1120-1160. Image courtesy of Colum

Hourihane LCSH: Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem - St-Gilles-du-Gard Note: The event is the essential part of the iconography. The plants, animals, and setting could also be indicated using LCSH. ICONOGRAPHY Jesus Christ - Entry into Jerusalem - Pictorial works Jerusalem - In art Palms in art Processions in art Donkeys in art HEADINGS OTHER THAN ICONOGRAPHY Relief (Sculpture), Romanesque - France - Saint-Gilles (Gard) Relief (Sculpture), French - France - Saint-Gilles (Gard) - 12th century

Despite this disparity in handling iconography, the value of LCSH or any subject heading list or thesaurus is in providing authorized forms for concepts, following guidelines. Consistency in use of authorized forms leads to collocation of material on the concept. It needs to be noted that subject analysis is, of course, subjective. Each cataloguer, even if applying the same vocabulary and using the same procedures, may end up with different subject headings. This is partly based on experience but also on point of view. That is, an art cataloguer will look with art eyes at a resource to be catalogued; a history or theology expert could see the resource differently. We library cataloguers naturally strive for objectivity and consistency in the application of subject analysis. Constructing subject heading strings is clearly somewhat complicated. With this in mind, OCLC started development of the Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (FAST) project in conjunction with LC, SAC, and other partners.- FAST is based on LCSH and grew out of projects OCLC had been doing with digital collections where cataloguers might be the authors of the

documents or others not trained in library cataloguing. Topics and subtopics are in one facet, places in another, form in yet another, with chronology faceted separately from the others. Deconstructing the LCSH strings does mean that some words may be ambiguously matched. For example, a work on Cistercian manuscripts created in Burgundy and housed in a Paris repository could mix creation and provenance place access. Still, the ease of applying FAST headings is attractive. The potential relevance of hits from a search can be determined by the person searching. Under the influence of web browsers and a desire to broaden searches to include databases and digital collections, libraries and system vendors have developed software platforms referred to as discovery layers. Such interfaces may provide collective access to library materials, journal databases, archival finding aids, image databases, digital collections, authority files, resource vocabularies, and other materials. These are usually characterized by a single search box in which one enters words without indicating whether they represent authors, topics, publishers, or titles. That is, it is similar to web browsing. The user can, in some discovery layers, then limit the search results by particular aspects or facets, such as format, language, publication date, or subject. One-box searching can lead to false matches since the subject strings will be deconstructed into words. A string such as “Illumination of books and manuscripts, Ottonian - Byzantine influences” combines two style/culture terms with an important relationship. The ease and ubiquity of searching in a web browser, however, strongly influence library catalogue builders, and work is continually underway to make a library catalogue be smarter about holding onto the nuance of subject headings in cataloguing, not relying merely on word occurrence and proximity to determine relevance. Both FAST and discovery layers are possible and enhanced by the coding in library records. Since the late 1960s, the main standard for coding of library data has been MARC (MAchineReadable Cataloguing). It has been stretched and revised for more than forty years and may be nearing the end of its useful life.

Efforts are underway to develop a new bibliographic framework that will be adhere to Semantic Web and Linked Open Data standards, allowing richer relationships between works, agents such as authors and illustrators, and subjects of various sorts as well as genres and forms. In such an environment, it might be possible to have a relationship coding that indicated that something was depicted. That thing could be a person (living or dead, or legendary or imaginary), institution, place, concept, event, work, or topic with “depiction” as the relationship between the work being catalogued and the thing depicted. LCSH subject strings were not built for such an environment. MARC does allow for inclusion of terminology from other vocabularies, such as Iconclass or the Art and Architecture Thesaurus, with the source vocabulary explicitly coded. LC, SAC, and others have been working on a separate genre/form thesaurus (LCGFT) for the past several years.- Some areas have already been developed. This will allow more focused access and lessen the need for long strings. Presently, the headings in the record for an exhibition catalogue will each have the subdivision “- Exhibitions.” With full implementation of genre/form headings, the LCGFT term “Exhibition catalogs” would replace the subdivision on the topical headings as well as clarify that “- Exhibitions” generally stands for the catalogue of an exhibition. As with FAST and other faceted searching, it might lead to some false hits. Subject heading strings, by their nature and as practiced in LCSH, have a certain amount of redundancy within the cataloguing for a particular work. That is, each string needs to cover an aspect of the topic, and subdivisions like place and time are often relevant to more than one aspect. The subdivisions, particularly place and genre/form, may repeat in each of the strings. Work on LCGFT is promising, though it will probably be some time before the terms will fully replace the subdivisions and significant catalogue maintenance will be necessary for full implementation. In the meantime, LCSH will continue to be the

principal subject heading system used by most North American libraries as well as libraries elsewhere around the world.

Notes 1 Foreign-language terms that are widely used in English are established in the foreign language - for example, Ut pictura poesis (Aesthetics); Catalogues raisonnés (used as heading as well as subdivision under individual persons). 2

For

more

information

on

TGM

and

to

search

terms,

see

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/tgm/ (accessed August 20, 2015). 3 Art Source uses some headings which are the same as LCSH (Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Devotion to), mostly LCSH (Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint - Purification - In art; LCSH would be just - Art), direct order-style headings (Venetian art, rather than Art - Italy - Venice as in LCSH), and other modifications. The Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals uses LCSH-style headings along with AAT, but subdivisions are given in a different order. 4 http://www.loc.gov/aba/publications/FreeSHM/freeshm.html (accessed August 12, 2015). 5 The Future of Subdivisions in the Library of Congress Subject Headings System: Report from the Subject Subdivisions Conference Sponsored by the Library of Congress, May 9-12,1991 (Washington, DC, 1992). 6 The purpose of this essay is to talk about the coverage, structure, and usage of LCSH. Much has been written on ABOUT-ness and OF-ness in cataloguing of art and resources about art, and the separation is not absolute. A picture book of dogs tells us about dogs. 7 For more information on FAST, see L.M. Chan and E.T. O’Neill, FAST: Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (Santa Barbara, 2010). 8

For

more

information

on

LCGFT

and

to

search

terms:

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/genreForms.html (accessed August 13, 2015).

16 Iconclass A key to collaboration in the digital humanities Hans Brandhorst and Etienne Posthumus

In a speech he gave at the Royal Library of the Netherlands on September 10, 1999, Pierre Vinken, CEO of Reed-Elsevier,1 fondly remembered his conversations with Henri van de Waal some thirty years earlier. Back in those days Vinken combined his work as a neurosurgeon with his job as editor of Excerpta Medica,- but was also engaged in art historical research.- More specifically, Vinken recalled that in the 1960s he worked on a subject classification system for medical information, while Van de Waal was working on something similar for art history. Both he and Van de Waal were stimulated by the possibilities computers had to offer for the processing of large data collections. Their joint fascination was the underlying theory of information and knowledge organization: “we were looking for the best way to structure an index, to design a comprehensive classification, to standardize a terminology.” Vinken and Van de Waal enjoyed their conversations “like fathers who cannot stop talking about their children.” However, Vinken added, “I don’t think we could have had these discussions with many other people, because there were not many of those children around.”

In the preface to the abridged edition of Iconclass, published in 1968, Van de Waal wrote, “We hope with this edition to draw attention to the possibilities of information collation and retrieval by means of computers. These possibilities have interested us ever since we started this project - almost two decades ago - but which now have become technologically possible.”- Whatever the exact scope of this interest in information technology, which he dated back to the late 1940s, it is indeed safe to assume that Van de Waal could not discuss his ideas on this topic in depth with many colleagues in the humanities. When he mentioned his intentions to use computers for the creation of an index to the first complete edition of the Iconclass system, at a CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) conference in Paris in 1969,- he had to defend himself to objections made by “adversaries of mechanization,” who feared “too great facility of use, danger of popularization, introduction of an inhuman factor into the humanities.” Van de Waal defended his choice by pointing out that the computer is a memory and a means of communication; it receives only what is brought to it by man; gives only answers compatible with the questions presented to it... it does not solve the formal essential problems in the history of art: because of this it will always be essential in these studies to have well classified series of reproductions.-

The computerized index, so Van de Waal announced at this conference, would be created on a computer “dressé par nos amis Allemands.”- It is not clear who these German friends were, but the forty thousand concepts, sixty thousand index terms, and fifty thousand bibliographic references that composed the Iconclass system according to Van de Waal’s estimate were certainly not entered into a computer at this stage. A little later, his contact with Vinken seemed to provide Van de Waal with an opportunity to actually use computers. In 1971 Frans van der Walle, developer for Infonet, the firm that created a computer system for Excerpta

Medica,- wrote a quotation for a computerized version of Iconclass. This project would involve the computerization of the Iconclass schedules, the alphabetical index to the classification, and the Iconclass bibliography.- The project brief contains the first attempt to describe the structure of the Iconclass system from the point of view of information science. It analyzed the properties of the system as it existed on paper, for the purpose of recreating it in a computerized form. Not surprisingly, the description of the notational structure began with a reference to the abridged edition of the Iconclass system, which formed the bulk of the Decimal Index of the Art of the Low Countries (DIAL).— This DIAL was published in a single volume in 1968 and included an introduction of ten pages explaining the principles of the classification. Eventually, Infonet was not awarded a contract, and the input of Iconclass data in a computer started some seven years later, on August 16, 1978. The computer used at that time was an IBM mainframe at the Centraal Rekeninstituut (CRI) of Leiden University.— The Infonet proposal was not implemented, and the DIAL introduction predates the first processing of Iconclass data by a decade. Still, these texts illustrate key features of the system and of Van de Waal’s ideas about its use. A few of these features shall be discussed. But first, it will be helpful to readers to summarize its basic principles even though this chapter is not intended as a general introduction to Iconclass.—

Some general principles Iconclass was conceived to address a problem that Van de Waal described as follows:— That there is such a thing as the problem of iconographie classification is known to everybody who ever tried to get a reply on an iconographie

question, as e.g.: How was the Annunciation portrayed in 17th-century Dutch painting? In an interior, in a church? With an Angel, or without? If with an Angel, is that Angel represented flying or walking, is he with wings or without? You all know that in the actual state of things it is almost impossible to get a conclusive reply to such questions which purely icono-graphic as they may be - nevertheless may represent an important link in various kinds of investigations. If we could solve these problems, the results - I think - would be to the profit of art history in the largest possible sense of the word.

Like all systematic classifications, the Iconclass system groups concepts into classes, each with their own members, who may again be a class, thus creating hierarchical chains of concepts. As these concepts describe the subject matter of cultural artifacts, they are often multidimensional, and the similarity between them is subjective, almost intuitive, as is illustrated by the following list of categories: 4

Society, Civilization, Culture

46

social and economic life, transport and communication

46A

communal life

46A1

social stratifi cation, social groups

46A2

social contrast

46A3

public welfare

46A4

relations between races

46A5

linguistic communication

46A6

societies and directory boards

46A7

crowd, mob

46A8 46A9

unusual manners of living primitive social structure

The location of a concept in a chain is expressed by an alphanumeric notation: the more specific a concept, the longer its notation. Therefore, a series of related subjects can be indicated by

a simpler notation than any of the subdivisions. 4

Society, Civilization, Culture

46 46A

social and economic life, transport and communication

46A1

social stratifi cation, social groups

46A2

social contrast

46A21

contrast between rich and poor

46A211

bad rich man, good poor man

46A212

giving alms or other charity, e.g.: handing out food

46A213

philanthropist...

communal life

Much of the system’s content - naturally - is based on the observation of images, so many concept definitions function as ready-made labels waiting to be assigned to images.— For Van de Waal, the system’s principle resembled that of a geographical map,— in the sense that it should try to represent the structure of a whole area, rather than identify all locations. The consistency of the structure should allow for continued subdividing, and to be of practical use, concepts should also be easily citable. Alphanumeric notations answered the second demand: complex definitions could be easily encoded and cited. The first goal - a consistent structure of the whole area - required many hours of observation, data collection, analysis, and experiment. By 1964, enough effort had been invested in this to enable Van de Waal to declare, I soon found, that all the portrayable could be reduced to a few fundamental main-divisions. I chose: (1) The Supernatural (2) Nature (3) Man (4) Society (5) Abstracts

In these five main sections, which form a system, closed in itself, there is in principle a place for each possible subject.—

However, as Van de Waal also soon discovered, specific instances of many of the subjects included in these five categories could be identified in history, mythology, and literature. For example, the general subject of giving alms, found in the list just referred to as “46A212 giving alms or other charity, e.g.: handing out food,” is also found in biblical stories - for example, “71W122 Job giving alms, relieving the poor.” Although the latter case is an instance of the alms-giving theme, it also has another dimension, as it is part of the biblical story of Job’s piety: 7

Bible

71

Old Testament

71W

the book of Job

71W1

Job’s wealth and piety (Job 1:1-5)

71W12

the piety of Job

71W122

Job giving alms, relieving the poor

As Van de Waal put it in 1964, We get as a supplement to the general sequences the following main divisions of a unique (“historical”) character: (6) History (7) Bible (8) Myths and legends, tales (with exception of class, ant.) (9) Myths and legends, of class, ant.

In the final published form of the Iconclass system, some divisions or classes were renamed,— and there were to be some shifts - for example, classical history moved to class 9 - but Van de Waal’s basic principle - the division between “general” and “specific” subjects - remained intact.

Designed on paper: the flexibility of the Iconclass structure There is an instructive difference between the description of the basic structure of Iconclass in the introduction to DIAL: “like any decimal classification our system can be extended from the left to the right, from main groups into an unlimited number of subdivisions,”— and in the Infonet brief: “every classification consists of an alphanumeric code with a fixed length of 13 symbols.”— The contradiction between “an unlimited number of subdivisions” and “a fixed length of 13 symbols” may seem a minor detail, indicative of the restrictions of many early database management systems, but it is also symptomatic for the tension between Iconclass’s very flexible organization of themes and motifs and the more rigid logic of software systems. The reason for this tension is simple: the Iconclass schedules and its system of notations— were constructed on paper, which allowed the logic of the notational system to develop “organically,” sometimes almost on an ad hoc basis. Whether this logic would actually work in a computer was seriously tested after the notational system had been completed. Moreover, its first emanation as a computer file had the production of a static, printed system as its objective,— so there was no real need for dynamic functionality in this first application. The human user supplied that functionality. A simple example helps to understand the issue. When the following list is examined, it will come naturally to read these lines from top to bottom: 4

Society, Civilization, Culture

46

social and economic life, transport and communication

46A

communal life

46A2

social contrast

46A21

contrast between rich and poor

46A212

giving alms or other charity, e.g.: handing out food

There may also be a little difficulty interpreting this as a group of related concepts of increasing specificity, expressed by the notations at the start of each line. However, while this can be simply read from the line starting with 46A to the next line starting with 46A2, a computer algorithm designed to allow the user to descend this hierarchy might very well trip over the fact that 46A1 is missing from this sequence. So, the translation of the paper version of Iconclass into a computer system had to deal with both aspects of the system. The notational structure had to be made totally consistent, and the instructions for its use - which were scattered over the seven printed volumes - had to be transformed into a single rule base, a “grammar” for Iconclass language. This translation was quite a complicated process, because although the repertoire of human concepts is in a sense hierarchical... it is nonetheless extremely different in nature from the precise and rigid way that concepts are built up systematically and strictly hierarchically in mathematics or computer science.—

By the end of the 1980s, an Iconclass datafile had been imported into several different database management systems, which resulted in divergent adaptations of the file to its new “habitats.”— In some applications, for example, the original spacing of notations was preserved. Most algorithms would by default interpret 46 A 21 2 as a series of four “words.” In others, the spaces were removed, so 46A212 became a single “word,” requiring different algorithms. In addition to this, different database systems offered different options for the retrieval or sorting of Iconclass concepts. Initially it was thought that the creation of an authoritative machine-readable Iconclass file, accompanied by an exhaustive grammar, would reduce the risk of divergencies and dialects.— It

soon became clear that the integration of an authoritative file and a grammar into an autonomous application would be a far better solution,— and in 1992 the first version of an Iconclass browser was published.—

Words, keywords, and cross-references The Infonet project aimed to produce printed versions of the Iconclass schedules, bibliography, and the alphabetic index. Beyond the algorithms that could produce these book pages, no further retrieval functionalities were required, although the programmers promised to take future developments into account. In particular, they foresaw “online queries, consisting of, for example, logical combinations of Iconclass codes and keywords.”— An example of the keywords they were thinking about would be “alms,” which would retrieve circa fifteen different concepts from the system, among which: 46A212

giving alms or other charity, e.g.: handing out food

71W122

Job giving alms, relieving the poor

In all, an entry vocabulary of some sixty thousand handpicked keywords was built to help locate concepts in the systematic schedules. Van de Waal, however, had more ambitious ideas about helping users to find concepts. The Infonet brief, the DIAL, and the general introduction to the first Iconclass volume (2-3) described an elaborate system of cross-references that he hoped would be “in itself a tool for iconographic research.”—

rock 25 H 11 2 c/, rocfcj Moses smiting the r. *“ Christ 11 D 46 : 71 E 19 2 magnetic r. *- Mary 11 F 45 : 25 C 2 r. types 25 D 1 Amaziah throwing the captive Edomites from the r. 71 M 94 1 Cycnus ii changed into a swan as he leaps from a r. 97 F 63 2 fire arising from the r, (Qideon'i offering} 71 F 16 23 3 house built on the r, (parable of Christ) 73 C 77 37 Jyloses in the (lift in the r, 71 E 23 8 fyksea smiting the t. twice at Kadesh 71 E 51 7 Prometheus chained to the r, 91 C 24 water coming from the r at Rephidim (Moses) 71 E 19 2 water coming from the r, (fivers of Paradise) 71 A 35 1 Samson ¿wells in the top of the r. Etam 71 F 34 6 ^cylla sitting on a r and speaking with Glaucus 97 Z 13 2 (+13 SCYLLA) r j splitting at Christ's death 73 D 63 33 Theseus taking sandals and sword from under the r 94 M (+12) Theseus thrown from a r, by Menestheus 94 M (+15)

Theseus and Pirithous chained to a r. 94 M (+15 : 93 f> 4) rocket (plant) 25 G 4 (ROCKET) rocket (projectile, 46 C 41 r. as toy 43 C 73 43 3 r, used for visual signalling 46 E 43 (ROCKET, rock-garden 41 A 63 3 rocking r, an infant 42 A 36 1 r. the cradle 43 C 71 32 rocking-chair 41 A 72 13 rocking-horse (toy) 43 C 78 72 2 rocky cf. rodfc r, region (topography of Hell) 11 T 12 r, coast 25 H 13 1

XIX

Figure 16.1 Iconclass system volume 2-3, p. XIX: this subtle manner of ordering concepts was not supported by the data.

This sample from Volume 2-3 may not immediately betray the amount of manual preparation that would have been needed to produce this type of output. However, if examined closely it will be realized that the sort order of these concept definitions would require the manual tagging of all the words which were marked with small dots. Eventually, these ideas could not be implemented. The Alphabetic Index, although elaborate and extremely useful, was based on the simpler principle of sorting the concepts according to their notation.

Coding of works of art with more than one subject As the DIAL was first of all a collection of photocards, ordered by subject - that is, Iconclass notation - the identification of multiple subjects in the same picture necessitated multiple prints. It was clear, therefore, to Van de Waal that “a more or less complete analysis of the numerous details within pictures could only be attempted successfully with the aid of a computer. The Iconclass system in its unabridged form can be of great use for such a task.”— When Van de Waal wrote this, in 1968, using Iconclass in a computerized format was not yet a realistic option, and working with a limitless number of digital reproductions of works of art was not even a fantasy. Things have changed.

Iconclass, a tool in a digital world In the final part of this essay the results of some of these changes shall be examined. The point of departure shall be an image that illustrates an already mentioned concept: 46A212 giving alms or other charity, e.g.: handing out food

Figure 162 A man blowing his own horn while giving alms (Georgette de Montenay, Emblèmes ou devises chrestiennes [edition: Frankfurt 1619], emblem 90).

This picture of a man giving alms to a beggar is part of an emblem by the sixteenth-century Protestant author Georgette de Montenay.— The motto Ne tibiis canatur^ and the fact that the donor is playing a trumpet while dropping a coin in the bowl show that giving alms describes only part of the subject matter. Christ’s message to “give to the needy in secrecy,” here blatantly ignored by the donor who “blows his own horn,” adds an important thematic dimension. The same Gospel chapter instructs Christians “to not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” when helping others.— This phrase is quoted in another book of moral instruction which was also popular in the early modern period.

“Mikrokosmos - Parvus Mundus,” originally by Laurentius Haechtanus and Gerard de Jode,— shows in its fifty-eighth emblem the rich man Archilla hiding a purse under a pillow, after his initial offer to help them financially had been rejected by his destitute friends (shown in the background). The German version by Martin Meyer calls Archilla an example of a true friend. The biblical idea that the poor should be secretly helped to ensure that the act is free from self-interest is a fairly general one, as is the definition of the Iconclass concept: 73C7425 “... that your alms may be in secret” ~ doctrine of Christ on possessions (Matthew 6:4)

To convey this abstract Christian doctrine, a specific story from classical antiquity is used on the one hand, while on the other hand the acts of “giving” and of “trompetter” are represented in a literal, concrete form. These modest images demonstrate that Van de Waal’s distinction between “general” and “specific” subjects does not coincide with levels of abstraction, since the more specific concept definition - “giving alms or other charity, e.g.: handing out food” is found among the general subjects of Class 4 Society, Civilization, Culture. The whole purpose of using a classification or any type of controlled vocabulary, for that matter, is its capacity to create and retrieve groups. By deliberately reducing the variety of the words and phrases used for the description of what is visible, similar phenomena will be labeled in the same way. Consider the first picture. In describing the act of the donor we have used both “playing a trumpet” and “blowing his own horn.” It would be easy to imagine other variants to describe a person blowing a trumpet, horn, or other wind instruments. By using the standardized phrases from a classification instead, systematic grouping is ensured and retrieval becomes much easier - for example:

48C7352 horn, trumpet, cornet, trombone, tuba 48C7525 one person playing wind instrument It is equally easy to see that in a database that uses a classification for information retrieval, much larger groups of similar material can be retrieved just by using a shorter form of the notation. The common denominator of these two concepts is: 48C7 music and Van de Waal took it for granted that future computer systems would have no trouble filtering all representations of the notion “music” from a bibliography or a photo archive, if they were indexed with this notation. He also foresaw that “a more or less complete analysis of the numerous details within pictures could only be attempted successfully with the aid of a computer.”— The automatic creation of groups of shared details might lead to unexpected observations and research questions. Again, a simple example should suffice. The beggar holding up his bowl to catch the donor’s coin is obviously handicapped. His right leg is bandaged and his foot seems to be missing; he also supports himself on low crutches. He thus combines details of different levels of abstraction: he is obviously poor and he has a physical handicap. His poverty, although visualized in a very concrete way - lifting a begging bowl - is also a more abstract condition, which places him in a social group: 4

Society, Civilization, Culture

46

social and economic life, transport and communication

46A

communal life

46A1

social cation, social groups

46A15

the poor

46A151

beggar

46A1511

begging bowl

It is important to realize that identifying and labelling a concrete detail such as a begging bowl in a picture automatically associate it with a more abstract concept - for example, the social group the poor. It is easy to find images where a physical handicap is used as a shorthand expression, like a default word in a visual language, for a beggar. 3

Human Being, Man in General

31

man in a general biological sense

31A

the (nude) human fi gure; “Corpo humano” (Ripa)

31A4

disabilities, deformations and monstrosities; diseases

31A41

disabilities, deformations

31A415

crippled

31A4153

crutches

The application of Iconclass thus allows easy retrieval of series of pictures combining the details found in these examples, randomly selected from a database of documents indexed with Iconclass.— These pictures of Saint Martin offering part of his cloak to a beggar, and of a beggar with crutches and a wooden leg,— also demonstrate that what is a detail in one picture can easily be the main theme in another one. For the creation of series, and the documentation of traditions, it is important to realize that categories are often fluid and their members may change with the context. The picture of Saint Martin and both emblem pictures simultaneously illustrate the concrete act of giving and the abstract notion of Generosity, here shown as it appears in the online Iconclass browser (Fig. 16.4). Upon closer inspection this browser screenshot tells quite a lot about the transformation over time of the Iconclass system, and also about its potential when used on the Internet. First of all, the context of every concept is immediately clear because its broader terms - its path through the hierarchy - is always shown. The keywords, originally handpicked for the alphabetic index, are

shown in italics. They can be used in logical combinations to retrieve concepts. In this case, for example, the combination of giving+abstract+idea will not only retrieve the abstract concept of Generosity but also automatically exclude well over 150 biblical scenes as well as classical mythology that involve an act of giving. The “see also” cross-references are fully operable, but with the present version of the browser, they have also become user-driven, which allows the community of users to enrich the system, going beyond the original ideas of Van de Waal about the role of the system.

Figure 16.3 (a) Saint Martin gives part of his cloak to a beggar. From Hours of Simon de Varie, Paris, c. 1455. (The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek MS 74 G 37, fol. 80r).

Figure 163 (b) Beggar on crutches (print made by Pieter Langendijk, after a design by Pieter Barbiers I, second quarter eighteenth century). s Abstract Ideas and Concepts 55 Property ssc Use of Property 5so Giving sscan Generosity, Liberality; 'GenerositA', 'Liberal itA' (Rjpa) GenenwttA • L/feexaiitA ■ fl/pa • ebwraec