medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

From: "Cormack, Margaret Jean" <[log in to unmask]>

> I was recently in Syracuse, where they  have a NEW  museum but full of what
looks like (but  undoubtedly is not) all the stuff found in excavations there
and the surroundings, including hundreds of votive figures, presented so that
one could even follow changing style through  the centuries. 


that's something like the idea, Meg.

reminds me a bit of the "old" musée in Chartres (below).

>It was wonderful, surrounded  by a garden that could only have been improved
by an a small "bar" (in the italian sense, where one could by ice cream.)

one too many "by"s in that sentence, i fear.

From: Genevra Kornbluth <[log in to unmask]>

> Nor really medieval, but-- on my first solo visit to the Louvre in 1974, 
I went to the ANE galleries to escape crowds. The stele with the Code of 
Hammurabi was so deserted by everyone (even the guards) that I made a 
rubbing of the inscription. When I revisited it last year I was dismayed 
to see that it is now on the recorded tour, and constantly surrounded by 
hordes of tourists taking pictures of each other standing as close to it 
as barriers will allow. 


well, how on earth can you know that you were actually *there* if you don't
have a picture of yourself and your friends with the Great Object?

no matter who the Hell Hammurabi might have been (some Old Dead White Guy, we
may presume), we're talking about one's Validation of one's Existence, after
all.

>As you say, surely there is middle ground somewhere!

well, as we say here in Southern Indianer sometimes say, the Middle of the
Road is where all the Roadkill can be found.

it would appear that the Real Threat to what used to be called Civilization as
We Know it comes not from towel-headed neo-middlevils, but from graduates of
Western museum schools, intent upon committing Collective Cultural Suicide.

my first visit to the municipal museum in Chartres --housed in the 18th c.
bishops' palace just behind the cathedral-- was also in those halcyon daze of
the later '60s of the last century of the last millennium.

like the Louvre, it, too, was something of a gloomy place --even in summer--
with only natural light from the large windows.

i can only remember a bunch of stuff --much of it middlevil, like suits of
armor-- and a quite magnificent (though artistically mediocre) bird's-eye-
view of the 1568 Siege of the city by the Hugonuts

http://images.easyart.com/highres_images/easyart/3/0/302230.jpg

if those iconoclastic Nutz had succeeded in taking the town, our whole modren
Construct of 12th and 13th c. French art might have been jeopardized.

as it turns out, that (artistically) second-rate painting is of great
archeological importance, since it gives us the only views we have of some
buildings which have been lost, both within and without the city walls.

we are looking at the town from the South:

http://images.easyart.com/highres_images/easyart/3/0/302230.jpg

--the church in the lower left of the painting (and, presumably, soon to be
set alight) is the ancient collegial of St. John (Saint-Jean-en-Vallée),
reformed by Bishop/St. Ivo at the end of the 11th c., now, literally, gone
without a trace;

--i assume that the large church below (southeast of) the cathedral, rather
near the walls, is that of St. Michel, its foundations now beneath a bank
(*that's* surely Progress for you);

--the roof of St. Peter's (Saint-Pere-en-Vallée) is burning, but the building
survives today;

etc.


the point is, when i went back to the museum in the mid-80s, this painting was
nowhere to be seen (neither were the knights' armors).

ah, the new Madame Curatrice appointed by Prezziedint Mitterand's Ministre de
Kulture (the same Jerk who o.k.ed the desecration of the lovely courtyard of
the Palais Royal in Paris) had Swept Away all that cobwebby Old Stuff and
rendered the whole place Tout Propre (and looking rather like the Langres
museum).  

(rumors flying about town concerning some *really* valuable 19th c. paintings
having gone mysteriously Walk About remained just that --rumors of a whispered
scandale which i was unable to confirm at the time.)

to judge by the floor- and wall-space freed up by the "renovation," at least
75% of the artifacts (a.k.a. "clutter") which i saw --but, of course, cannot
remember-- in the late '60s had been "liberated" by the mid-80s.  

a very successful Lobotomy, i would say. 

though the musée's management has, apparently, changed hands in the last few
decades, as far as i know the middevil objects once entrusted to its care
(that is to say, **the Medieval Heritage of the City of Chartres**) are still
given Short Schrift, at the least.


a few years ago our listmember Jim Bugslag was able to salvage a few early
13th c. sculpted figures --*in stucco*[!!]-- from a corner of the open-air
basement of the 18th c. building, lying in the dirt.

see his publication of these very precious remains (originally from the Hotel
Dieu, across from the west facade of the cathedral, rebuilt shortly after the
1194 fire and demolished in a quite astonishing deliberate act of Vandalism in
the 1860s):

James Bugslag, “L’Hôtel-Dieu de Chartres. Vestiges et reconstruction,”
in Delphine Hanquiez, ed., Regards sur les dépôts lapidaires de la France du
Nord (2011), pp. 53-69.


it's really quite difficult (for me at least) to know what to think of this
level of Mindlessness.

"suicide" doesn't quite begin to Cover It, somehow.

c




> From: medieval-religion - Scholarly discussions of medieval religious
culture [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Christopher Crockett
[[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2012 8:39 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [M-R] Feasts and Saints of the Day: May 23
> 
> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
> 
> From: John Dillon <[log in to unmask]>
> 
> > A new set of views of the chapelle Saint-Didier in Langres' ex-église
> Saint-Didier, now part of the city's Musée d'art et d'histoire (Musée Guy
> Baillet):
> 
> 
> the contrast between
> 
> > http://tinyurl.com/33tqbq
> 
> and
> 
> > http://tinyurl.com/cgnod8m
> 
> is rather striking --and speaks volumes about concepts of building usage
(to
> say nothing about concepts of "art" display).
> 
> of course, a "dépôt lapidaire" is not, strictly speaking, a Musée.
> 
>
http://www.proz.com/kudoz/french_to_english/architecture/4512163-d%C3%A9p%C3%B4t_lapidaire.html
> 
> but i am put in mind of my first trip to the Louvre in the late '60s of the
> last century of the last millennium.
> 
> i recall wandering into a largish gallery, unlit save for an exterior wall
of
> windows (it was mid-summer, but still rather gloomy in there).
> 
> the other three sides of the room were lined with huge glass cases, each
one
> filled with shelves and shelves and shelves of Greek pots, one next to the
> other, hundreds and hundreds of them (or so it seemed), with hardly an
> identifying étiquette to be seen, save perhaps at the top of each case.
> 
> i had just come from a semester's survey class in Greek art and had seen
only
> a few dozen pots --only the "best" in the medium of course-- and had, quite
> literally, no idea whatever that exemplars of such "art" once existed in
the
> scores of thousands.
> 
> 
> in the mid-80s of the last century of the last millennium i had occasion to
> revisit that Louvre room.
> 
> it looked rather like the sterile Musée Guy Baillet ("tout propre" is the
> right French term, i believe).
> 
> what's *wrong* with this picture?
> 
> http://tinyurl.com/cgnod8m
> 
> it's a bit like getting an historical lobotomy.
> 
> there must be *some* sort of space, somewhere, between those two extremes.
> 
> c
> 
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