medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
From: richard landes <[log in to unmask]>
> well i find the identification convincing, unless someone can offer an
alternative passage. "clouds or something else" won't do.
the problem is, rl, that we are dealing with a "conventional" representation
of whateverthehelltheyare at Moissac.
i have, at great trouble, time and expense, tediously retrieved the various
strings of the original discussion on Medart-L (on and around 1 April, 2003, i
see) and will forward a few of the relevant posts from that foodfight to this
list.
MG was, indeed, right, and i did, indeed, Poo-Poo the somewhat knee-jerk
interpretation of the wavy forms in the Moissac tympanum as "water".
re-reading my own brilliant, limpid prose now, these 18 months later, i see no
reason to revise the view expressed at that time.
briefly put, while the "Wavy Forms" @ M. are *identical* in appearance to
quite a bunch of "Wavy Forms" in innumerable other, contemporary sculptural
exemplars where the context makes it indisputably clear that those "Wavy
Forms" are meant to represent *water*, not clouds, just as many exemplars can
be found where the precise opposite is true.
we are thus hoisted upon a cleftstick/petard of an unresolvable interpretaion
based on the ambiguity of representations within the visual vocabulary of 12th
c. French sculptors.
otOh, the "glassy sea resembling crystal" of the BoR text is more than
somewhat ambiguous in and of itself, so a compromise might be reached by
proposing that the Moissac Master was playing Both Ends Against the Middle,
Splitting the Difference and Riding the Waves (as it were) of the pre-existing
Ambiguity by conflating the commonly used convention of wavy forms as *clouds*
with the "Glassy Sea" of his text.
i'm not buying it, however, since the Moissac Tymp. simply does *not* depict
"a glassy sea resembling crystal".
it just doant.
sorry.
*this* is a representation of "a glassy sea resembling crystal" :
http://rubens.anu.edu.au/htdocs/bytype/manuscripts/survey/0001/180.JPG
(Soissons Gospels, early 9th c., a Chef-d'Oeuvre of Carolingian ms
illumination)
> it suggests that when conceiving of these tympana and when looking at
them, people saw the nature of salvation in terms of the apocalyptic
drama of Rev., that they situated themselves in cosmic time by placing
themselves in this drama.
yes, clearly.
plugging this basic observation into your own work on these Tsunami-like
"waves" (or were they just "clouds"?) of Millennialism which swept through the
11th-12th cc., i arrive at the possibility that we are looking --in the
Moissac tympanum and elsewhere-- at, not just some sort of "generic"
representation of a Biblical text, but rather at a rare survival of an
artifact of a quite specific Spasm of suchlike belief in the period 1135-55.
>this is the thrust of much of the collection put together by Emmerson and
McGinn (esp articles by Morrison and Emmerson), but extended to many facets of
medieval culture, esp 12th cn.
i don't know "Emmerson and McGinn".
more to come.
c
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