>Otfried (trying for a moment to think of other things than selling Harry
Potter...)
jez, Otfried, you've gotta quit that silly gig and get back to full-time
emailing on this list, throw your peals before a better class of swine.
>I would include theories of vision/imagination, meditation and contemplation
indeed.
but, would you agree, not nearly so much because medieval artists went
out and actually *read* treatises on these matters (though they indeed
may have), but because *our* own reading of these theoretical works informs
*us* of
(1) the actual nature of "vision/imagination, meditation and contemplation"
("old" ideas not necessarily being wrong ones) and
(b) the *medieval* view of such important/crucial matters, as held by the
contemporaries of the creative artists themselves?
along this line, it seems to me that it would be very helpful for us to
emphasize the essential distinction between "style" (the treatment of form)
and "iconography" (the treatment of subject matter); and, in the context of
this string, what influence (if any) "theologians" had on either --or both--
of these aspects of artistic production.
Aleks Pluskowski's perfectly valid observation goes to the former
--iconographic-- aspect:
>To what extent were iconographic representations of apocalyptic demons, or at
least apocalyptic settings (post-conversion) influenced by written sources?
while Pat Sloane's question,
>Do you mean that artists read these theologians, and adjusted their practice
accordingly? Or do you mean that interpreters of art were guided by these
texts?
may go, i think, primarily to the latter.
and Beth Williamson's astute observation seems, to me, to speak to both
(though she may have only intended it to be a question of the *iconographic*
influence of images on visions, depending upon how one defines her use of the
word "form"):
>....images in art affected the *form* [emp. mine] of mystics' visions... It
is all too easy to think of religious imagery as being illustrative only, and
not in any way dynamic or influential in itself.... the particular form of
certain visions also appears to have been influenced
by paintings or sculptures which the visionary might have seen.
art historians --especially late 20th c. *american* art historians, in my
experience-- very rarely (dare one say never??) broach the question of
the origin(s) of style.
it seems to me that medieval "style" (and here i mean primarily what the pros
call "figure style" --the formal language in and through which human and
divine creatures are conceived and realized)-- is, above all, *conceptual* in
nature.
"Romanesque" artists (especially) are "mystics" in this sense, to my mind and
eye (though so is, say, Jan van Eyck).
though our textual sources are, typically, distressingly silent on the
subject, i submit that, _de facto_ a fellow who could generate and hold
in his "mind's eye" a vision as complex, consistant and --above all-- *clear*
as, say, the central tympanum at Vezelay *must* have been an
adept in some very advanced meditational techniques.
the ability to technically *realise* this vision in stone --significant and
hard-won though it certainly is-- pales beside that initial,
essential "skill."
and it is, therefore, certainly no accident that his form language seems
clearly to be part of a generations-long stylistic "sequence" (in the sense of
that word used by George Kubler in his _The Shape of Time_) of Cluniac
monastic imagery.
where and through what mechanisms the individual artist acquired
his(/her) *formal conceptual language* is as crucial --no, more crucial (my
own prejudice)-- as the mere sources of his iconographic catalogue.
he took it in with his mother's milk, in the universe of imagery in which he
got his _formation_ --a universe which we can scarcely imagine or reconstruct,
given the paucity and state of the few ruins which are left to us (e.g.,
99.999% of all mural paintings gone without a trace).
interesting string.
best to all from here,
christopher
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