L'image a' l'epoque romane and Le croire et le voir: L'art des cathedrales . - XIIe-XVe siecles - book review

JEAN WIRTH

L'image a' l'epoque romane

Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1999.

506 pp.; 186 b/w ills. 310FF

ROLAND RECHT

Le croire et le voir: L 'art des cathedrales

(XIIe-XVe siecles)

Paris: Gallimard, 1999. 456 pp.;

85 b/w ills. 195FF

Few works have had so profound, prolonged, and, some now might even say, pernicious impact on the study of medieval art as the encyclopedic works executed by Emile Male at the turn of the last century. Male's monumental project to decode, or dechiffrer, as he described it, the symbolic content of medieval art began with L'art religieux du XIIIe siecle en France, first published in 1898 (and then in numerous revised editions), a work better known in English as The Gothic Image. (1) This work set out to map 13th-century thought through the period's iconographic repertory; Male's cathedrals were mirrors of theology, and all that could be conceived or uttered in the Church's terms found its analogous expression in Gothic art. Several similarly ambitious projects on later medieval art intervened before Male turned his attention to uncovering Gothic art's sources, culminating finally in 1922 with L'art religieux du XIIe siecle en France. (2) This late publication was meant to serve as a kind of prequel to the 1898 volume, for Romanesque art, with all of the acknowledged expressivity and even brilliance exhibited by 12th-century artists, still remained in Male's grand scheme little more than a precursor to the dazzling achievements of the 13th century. If the art of the cathedral age was the expression of the summa of Christian knowledge, rationally ordered in accordance with the tenets of Thomas Aquinas and William Durandus, then Romanesque art was but a quaint expression of still uncertain theology.

In the broadest terms, Male's interest in the interrelationship of religious practice and artistic change remains a current one today, but the study of medieval art for many has long since parted ways with Male's method of iconographic interpretation--one that consisted largely in the recognition of normative patterns of represented themes (and ultimately of their sources), in identifications that satisfy empiricist cravings, and, most important, in the discovery of the appropriate clerical text to assure us of our identification's heuristic footing. Yet even as we part ways with his method, we frequently find ourselves still looking over our shoulders to Male; his analyses of art's relation to hagiography, monasticism, and, most notably, liturgical drama were pioneering and still deserve our critical attention. One need think only of Erwin Panofsky, for whom iconographic analysis served a necessary first step to iconological interpretation, or Michael Camille, who targeted Male as an icon to be toppled in hi s mischievously titled book The Gothic Idol, to gauge the range of responses to Male's legacy. The two books under review, one on the Romanesque period and one on the Gothic, are further reminders of this inheritance, and of the reactions it provokes.

Jean Wirth states unequivocally in his introduction that Male's opus on 12th-century art is the inspiration for L'image l'epoque romane. It would not be far from the mark to say that Wirth's book attempts to rewrite Male's iconography for our own times, revisiting the question of symbolic meaning and cultural patterns of representation. The result does indeed bear some similarity, yet Wirth's scope is both more comprehensive in time and geographic range and more selective in the themes chosen for consideration, dwelling mostly around the phenomenon of the Gregorian reform movement. More significantly, it is not so much Male's goal of iconographic identifications that interests Wirth as it is the systems and systematic premises of representation--and their effects on evolving iconographic themes--that a probing study of Romanesque motifs should recover.

Le croire el le voir by Roland Recht likewise revisits some of Male's methodological territory. Recht, however, also holds in reverence the Warburgian mode of interpretation and thus works less through analysis of iconography, in the sense understood by Male, than through the representational, behavioral quality of images. In other words, Recht seeks to understand the dual evolution of changing theological positions--including such factors as private devotion and even religious taste--and modes of representation. Central to his idea is that the notions of seeing, in theological and also lay understandings, coincided with changes in representation; that "believing and seeing," as the title declares, are part of the same cultural system and, moreover, contingent on one another for the success of representation. Complementary epistemologies--knowing through belief and knowing through visual understanding--lie at the heart of Gothic art and explain the proliferation of certain art forms that defined the "age of c athedrals." In this striving to understand the underlying principles of thought that govern representation, Recht's project is not so different from Wirth's; the procedures, however, by which the two distinguished scholars decode iconography are quite opposed indeed.