art and literature i || periodization and the politics of perception: a romanesque example

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Periodization and the Politics of Perception: A Romanesque ExampleAuthor(s): Stephen G. NicholsSource: Poetics Today, Vol. 10, No. 1, Art and Literature I (Spring, 1989), pp. 127-154Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772558 .

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Periodization and the Politics of Perception: A Romanesque Example

Stephen G. Nichols Romance Languages, Pennsylvania

Words and images tend to be viewed oppositionally in the ongoing effort to determine the nature of the claims each makes to representation. As W. J. T. Mitchell (1986: 47) recently noted, "Words and

images seem inevitably to become implicated in a 'war of signs' (what Leonardo called a paragone) in which the stakes are things like nature, truth, reality, and the human spirit.... each art characterizes itself in

opposition to its 'significant other.'" Mitchell is talking here about primary orders of representation:

what aspects of nature, truth, reality, and the human spirit words and images best portray and how. I would like to explore a different aspect of the paragone: the debate of word and image as it affects periodizing concepts. I will seek to illustrate how profoundly the figures of difference we ascribe to each medium control not only the ways we view the cultural artifacts associated with word and image, but also the ways we situate them in history.

When we talk about periodization, we construct a taxonomy of images and texts situated in the supposedly neutral flux of cultural history. And here the concept of paragone assumes a particularly fascinating role. Bearing in mind that the Old Italian term meant "comparison" and, by extension, a model or ideal against which to compare something, we discover that the terms of comparison in periodization inevitably privilege one art or the other, either word or image.

The reasons for such prevalorized comparison have much less to

Poetics Today 10:1 (Spring 1989). Copyright ? 1989 The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. ccc 0333-5372/89/$2.50.



128 Poetics Today 10:1

do with the artifacts under examination than with the agenda of the historians concerned with establishing period boundaries in the first place. In the case of the Middle Ages, the problem has been particularly acute, because modern definitions of medieval culture, from the eighteenth century to the present, have been driven by ideological agendas that have more to do with legitimizing the modern age than with accurately parsing medieval culture.

Modern ideologies, as Hans Blumenberg (1983: 77) recently noted, lowered the Middle Ages "to the rank of a provisional phase of human self-realization, one that was bound to be left behind, and finally dis-

qualified as a mere interruption between antiquity and modern times, as a 'dark age.'" In short, the Middle Ages itself has tended to play the role of text or image, an element of implied or explicit comparison with subsequent ages. The various periods of the modern world which have appropriated the medieval past for their own present purposes have failed to recognize a fascinating irony of cultural history. In attributing to medieval culture a posterior intentionality, moderns have overlooked the fact that the appropriation of the past by the

present-the keystone of period ideology-simply continues a tradi- tion well known to the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages, too, appropriated history for its own purposes. The ideological difference lies in the medieval attempt to make that appropriation definitive for all time.

In what follows, I would like to consider medieval period conceptu- alization, taking Romanesque for my example, as a paragone between art and architecture, on the one hand, and verbal texts on the other.

By Romanesque I mean the period stretching roughly from the rebuild-

ing of the cathedral of Chartres in the early eleventh century to its

replacement by the present Gothic edifice at the end of the twelfth.

My approach suggests that the interartistic debate was less a product of modern periodizing than a conflict begun in the Middle Ages and continued, unwittingly, by moderns. We shall find that the periodizing practiced in the early nineteenth century privileged monumental

architecture-Romanesque churches-as cultural images, whereas the

period we call Romanesque seems to have valorized the image in terms of its filiation to and dependence on the word as text. And this was so even when the text took the form of monumental architecture. Our own, postmodern resolution of the debate tends to equate the two sign systems as complementary forms of representation, each implicating the other. In Romanesque, they were more probably conceived as a continuum.

We will look first at the invention of the period term in the early nineteenth century and then at an interartistic work written and

painted in 1028 to commemorate the completion of the new Roman-

esque cathedral of Chartres and the death of its builder, Bishop Ful- bert.



Nichols * The Politics of Perception

Romanesque and Scientific Ideology In 1819, Charles de Gerville, a Norman botanist and amateur architectural historian, invented the term Romanesque. Gerville's observations on Romanesque illustrate admirably a comment made some years ago by the French medievalist Albert Pauphilet (1950: 23) that "il est dans la destinee du Moyen Age de suggerer aux modernes des idees fausses." Gerville conceived of the period and its style as a debased imitation of Roman architecture. In a letter to a friend he wrote in December 1818:

Je vous ai quelquefois parle de l'architecture romane. C'est un mot de ma facon qui me parait heureusement invente pour remplacer les mots insig- nifiants de saxone et de normande. Tout le monde convient que cette architecture lourde et grossiere, est l'opus romanorum d6natur6 ou successivement

degrad6 par nos rudes ancetres. Alors aussi, de la langue latine, 6galement estropi6e, se faisait cette langue romane dont l'origine et la d6gradation ont tant d'analogie avec l'origine et le progres de l'architecture. (Cited in Gidon 1934: 285-86)

[I have sometimes spoken to you of architecture romane. It is my own term, and strikes me as a happy replacement for the meaningless terms Saxon and Norman. Everyone agrees that this heavy and vulgar architecture is the opus romanorum deformed and successively degraded by our primitive ancestors. Thus did this Romance language-whose origin and decline are so analogous to the origin and development of the architecture-evolve from a similarly mangled Latin language.]

We shall see why Gerville instinctively drew an analogy between language and architecture in a moment. First, note how he treats the monuments as texts, to which he imputes an intentionality not of representation but of mimesis or imitation, a much more restricted concept of representation. He also focuses on formal characteristics of expression, in short, on a taxonomy of style, Romanesque being a more adequate appellation than Norman or Saxon for his purposes precisely because its onomastic inscribes a hierarchical genealogy to the monuments. This genealogy coincides with Gerville's conservative

philosophical anthropology. Norman and Saxon suggest autochthonous

origins, implying a rupture in continuity between the classical and medieval, a rupture that would ill suit the concept of cultural conti-

nuity that Gerville, as a pre-Darwinian botanist, espouses. Let us make no mistake: The theory of imitation Gerville imputes

to these monuments springs directly from his "scientific" orientation, itself a powerful ideology of the time. In the early nineteenth century botany, shaped by the "artificial" taxonomic system devised by Lin- naeus, and by the later, "natural" system of Jussieu, was considered

1. "The Middle Ages are destined to suggest false ideas to modern scholars." All translations are mine.

129



130 Poetics Today 10: 1

both a science and a philosophy of nature. Botany manuals of the

period stress continuity between the antique and modern periods. It was Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotle, "the father of natural

history," that gave birth to truly scientific phytological inquiry (Castle 1829: 4).

In this historical perspective, the Romans continued the work of the Greeks, but the Middle Ages represented a major interruption in the progress of scientific study. Thomas Castle (ibid.: 7) describes this

period as

emphatically ... "the dark age," [during which] a dismal gloom enveloped the whole of the civilized world; ignorance, superstition and barbarism tyrannized over learning and genius; knowledge of any kind, was to be acquired only by searching among the rubbish of monasteries; fabulous legends supplied the place of truth, and the deception of a crafty priesthood debased, at the same time that they enslaved the minds of men.... it was not until the middle of the sixteenth century, that the sun of science again burst from a thick cloud, and shed its rays upon the north of Europe. While Castle praises the "artificial" system of classification devised

by Linnaeus (1707-78), he hails the newer system of Antoine de Jussieu (1748-1836). The difference between the two lies in the do- main of word and image. Linnaeus's system treats plants as signs, Jussieu's as images. Linnaeus undertook to synthesize "the observations and plans of his predecessors" and "established an artificial system, characterized by the simplicity of its foundations, the perspi- cuity of its arrangement, and the infinite extent of its applications" (ibid.: 11).

In our terms, Linnaeus may be said to have established a grammar of plants sufficiently useful for discussion and general recognition, but

insufficiently precise for the serious observing scientist. Jussieu (1789: 6) in fact describes the Linnaean method as conventional and con- cludes that

ces distributions systematiques ne doivent etre regardees que comme des tables raisonnees dans lesquelles les plantes sont disposees arbitrairement et suivant des signes de convention propres a les faire aisement reconnoitre, en attendant quon puisse leur assigner leur veritable lieu dans l'ordre de la Nature ... le seul digne de faire l'objet de la science.

[these systematic distributions must be considered mere rationalized tables in which plants are laid out arbitrarily according to conventional signs de-

signed to make them easily identified, to wait to be assigned their true place in the order of nature, which ... is the only object worthy of science.]

In contrast, Jussieu studied the plants themselves and based his

taxonomy on their description as physical objects. An extract from the official Register of the Royal Academy of Sciences for July 1, 1789




(ibid.: 5), outlines Jussieu's method of studying plants in order to

provide a descriptive definition, an image of the whole and its parts:

I1 en r6sulte, pour le Botaniste, la necessite de connoitre d'une part tous les

organes dont les plantes sont munies, et de l'autre toutes les modifications de

chaque organe, c'est-a-dire, tous les caracteres qui distinguent les plantes.

[Ultimately, the botanist must examine, on the one hand, all the organs of which plants are composed and, on the other, every aspect of every organ, that is, every distinguishing trait.]

Furthermore, the defense of the natural method is based on the simi-

larity of the images of the groupings of plants so established:

L'existence de ces groupes ne peut etre revoquee en doute; elle est incon- testablement demontree par ces ressemblances qui non seulement reunis- sent plusieurs especes de plantes dans des differents genres, mais qui ras- semblent encore, dans un meme ordre, plusieurs genres differents d'une maniere si evidente. (Ibid.: 12)

[The existence of these groups cannot be placed in doubt; it is incontestably proven by these similarities, which not only link numerots species of plants in distinct genres, but also bring together, in one order, several different

genres in so obvious a manner.]

More to the point, the natural system, based as it is on images, has the advantage of mimetic fidelity to nature:

Les Botanistes ont ete quelquefois obliges d'abandonner jusqu'aux caracteres principaux de leur classification [artificielle], pour ne pas eloigner des especes ou des genres que la Nature elle-meme les forcoit de reunir. (Ibid.)

[Botanists have sometimes even been forced to abandon the principal characteristics of their [artificial] classification in order not to separate species or genres that Nature herself forced them to bring together.]

Of course, from the perspective of representation, both systems undertake to convert perceived objects into a symbolic order, a lan-

guage. The difference between Linnaeus and Jussieu lies in the de-

gree of conventionality each is willing to concede. Linnaeus tends toward the arbitrary, while his successor, a younger contemporary of Rousseau, prefers the analogy with natural language. Jussieu opts for the natural sign, one suspects, for reasons not unlike that underly- ing Gombrich's (1982) recent espousal of the concept: its purported iconicity.2

We do find, in fact, that botanists contemporary with Jussieu apply

2. Gombrich (1982: 278) argues the "common-sense distinction between images, which are naturally recognizable because they are imitations, and words, which are based on conventions." For a discussion of Gombrich's position, see Mitchell 1986: ch. 3.

131




the analogy between his natural system and natural language to elabo- rate a cultural anthropology, somewhat as we see Gerville doing for medieval architecture. Thus Thomas Castle links the development of

language in primitive humans to the discovery and naming of plants. The interaction of humans with their herbal environment "must have been [a] natural circumstance to call forth a peculiar language, for

distinguishing one plant from another" (Castle 1829: 3). Revealingly, the relationship between human and nature implies naming, the me- diation of language seen, not as conventional but as natural:

That a natural language must have been the result of necessity and conve- nience, is very certain; for without it, our ancestors could only have passively admired or valued the boundless gifts of nature.... by a simple, and, as it were, an instinctive dialect, they readily secured themselves from harm, and were capable of judging and employing the succeeding blessings of the seasons to their necessary comfort and support. (Ibid.)

Both the artificial or conventional system, described as "an immortal index to plants, simple in its construction, and comprehensive in its

application" (ibid.: xv), and the natural language model, described as

allowing us "to read the simple laws and exquisite regulations of the

vegetable kingdom" (ibid.), privilege the observing subject, the scientist, over the observed phenomenon. It is the scientist who observes and identifies the natural object, classifying it in accordance with the

principles of botanical science, principles which require him to rename the observed phenomenon in scientific, Latin terminology. We find, in short, a presupposition that the object is not simply observed but

appropriated by the new scientific language into which it is transposed. Furthermore, scientific study emphasizes universal, as opposed to

particular, manifestations in the objects scrutinized. Jussieu's natural method, we are told, can be reduced to two basic principles, both

of which involve linking individual phenomena to universal schema.3 Classification thus constitutes a process of decontextualization in which

the vernacular setting is effaced and the vernacular name devalorized as "unscientific." We recognize here the same impulse that led Gerville

to reject "the meaningless terms Saxon and Norman" in favor of a

3. Ainsi, ayant observe que l'espece est la collection des individus absolument sem- blables, il a ajoute que, pour suivre la marche de la Nature dans le rapprochement des especes, il faut joindre celles qui se ressemblent par le plus grand nombre de leurs caracteres, et il prouve la virite de ce principe par l'examen de plusieurs genres tres naturels et generalement avoues.

Cette analyse offrant en outre des caracteres plus constants et d'autres qui le sont moins, donne lieu a l'inonci d'un autre principe; savoir, que les caracteres doivent etre pesis ou calcules suivant leur valeur relative, de sorte qu'un caract&re constant

equivaut a plusieurs caracteres variables. Ces deux principes riunis forment, selon lAuteur, la base principale de la methode naturelle, et donnent la mesure des affinites existantes. (Jussieu 1789: 6-7)



Nichols * The Politics of Perception 133

more scientific Latin terminology: opus romanorum and its vernacular equivalent, architecture romane.

We need not look beyond Jussieu's two principles of the natural method for studying and classifying plants to discover what Gerville managed to gain by applying the scientific principles of his botanical metier to his architectural interests. In renaming the Saxon and Norman architecture, he identified the individual manifestations of early medieval Norman churches as links in a chain stretching, tem- porally and spatially, from classical Rome to the French High Gothic of Chartres.

This move corresponds toJussieu's first principle, which he explains by comparing plants either to links in a chain formed by the vege- tal orders in nature, or to a geographic map on which each being occupies a fixed point whose relationship to the whole may be readily determined (Jussieu 1789: 6).

Gerville's deprecating evaluation of Romanesque conforms to Jus- sieu's second principle: "Les caracteres doivent etre peses ou calcules suivant leur valeur relative, de sorte qu'un caractere constant equivaut a plusieurs caracteres variables" (ibid.).4 The constants in this case, such as the Roman arch, permit the identification of the opus romanorum, while the variables, perceived as stylistic deviations, receive a deprecating evaluation.

We saw above that Castle links natural language with philosophical anthropology via the original process of naming plants. He speaks of "an instinctive dialect" by which early humans managed to transform their environment into a cognitive order: "They . . . were capable of

judging and employing the succeeding blessings of the seasons to their necessary comfort and support" (Castle 1829).

Gerville's critique of the stylistic variable in the articulation of Ro- manesque architecture as "language" springs from his perception of it as a failure of ordered, cognitive discourse. For Gerville, the movement from Latin expression, the opus romanorum, to vernacular expression marks a debasement of learning, a departure from rational language: "Alors aussi, de la langue latine, egalement estropiee, se faisait cette langue romane dont l'origine et la degradation ont tant d'analogie avec l'origine et le progres de l'architecture." Romanesque architecture is failed discourse because it cannot compare favorably with the classical models in whose image he sees it trying to cast itself.5

4. "The characteristics of plants must be weighed or judged according to their relative value, so that one constant characteristic equals several variable ones." 5. Gerville's conception of the Romance vernacular as debased Latin accords with neoclassical language theories expressed by Pasquier, Voltaire, and Marmontel and adopted by Francois Raynouard (1761-1836). They conceived of Provencal as "le langage roman ou roumain corrompu," a theory finally rejected by the founder




Beneath Gerville's aesthetic condemnation of Romanesque lies a neoclassical ideology that expresses itself in the inexorable symmetry of the language and tables of plant phytology of the period. In deplor- ing Romanesque architecture as a failed discourse, Gerville denies it the existence of an enunciating subject with a clear program, an inten-

tionality capable of mature thought and lucid expression. In contrast, his praise of the Roman models suggests a strong bias for the equation of symmetrical form with lucid philosophical and scientific expression, such as we have seen mapped upon the natural world of plants by the work of Jussieu and reflected in the phytological tables of classification and in the architecture of botanical gardens and hothouses of the

early nineteenth century (see Figures 1 and 2). If Romanesque architecture was a failed discourse for Gerville, the

problem may well have been its asymmetry, an asymmetry that Goethe

deplored in the cathedral of Strasbourg when he devised a plan for

adding what he took to be a missing tower to the facade. Gerville viewed the speaking subject enunciated by Romanesque architecture as an inept performer of Roman discourse-like Echo in Ovid's myth of Narcissus-rather than as a creator of a new vernacular language of architecture. Trained in a method that privileged constants over variables, convinced that the formal image was the essence of Ro-

manesque architecture, Gerville evaluated rather than questioned its monuments. Yet even though he believed them devoid of a speaking subject, of an intentionality worthy of study, Gerville did see that architecture was a discourse, and he did recognize the tension between the Roman model and the vernacular example.

Romanesque and Critical Iconology E. R. Curtius (1953: 355) perceived the Middle Ages as marked by a relation of tension between Rome and Romania, "a tension which

[even] Dante was unable to resolve . . . theoretically." To a certain extent Curtius, like Gerville, viewed the Middle Ages as opposed to a

precursor of greater aesthetic and philosophical importance. We can avoid the theoretical impasse evoked by Curtius if, instead of trying to balance different goals from different periods, we view this tension as a topology of dynamic interaction of practices within the same historical boundary, the same space and time of a given social formation.6

of Romance philology, Friedrich Diez (1794-1876), who "taught that all Romance

languages were independent developments of Latin" (Curtius 1953: 30-35). 6. It is historically true that the image is constantly subject to historical appropriation by

major collocations of power elsewhere in the social formation; but that does not entail ... a topological placing of power as always the image's exterior, and of the image's work of signification as dissocie, un autre langage. l'exercise d'une autre physiognomie. The

topology is rather one of dynamic interaction of practices within the same boundary, the same Mobius enclosure of the social formation. The practices of painting and of




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Chartres, built by Bishop Fulbert when the pre-Romanesque church burned in 1023.

A two-folio tumulus or tombeau produced at Chartres after his death in 1028 shows Fulbert in his new church (Figures 3-8). We find that the contemporary artifact stresses just those elements that Gerville

ignores: the relationship between artwork, producer, and the social formation (see Merlet and Clerval 1893). In fact, the tumulus of Ful- bert casts the tension between Roman and Romanesque as a dynamic interaction of practices within the same social formation. The tumulus, in short, illustrates history, as the dynamics of an appropriation of

antiquity, rather than philology, as an authentic reconstitution of the

past. Fulbert, like his mentor, Gerbert of Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II), had

a reputation as one of the most learned men of his time. The tumulus

commemorating his death is the work of two monks: Sigo, a writer, composed the eulogy on the recto and verso of the first folio (Figures 3, 4, 6, and 7), while Andre de Mici did the painting on the second folio (Figures 5 and 8) and perhaps the decorative arch and columns on the recto of the first folio and the decorated borders on the verso. The tumulus is thoroughly interartistic in execution, since each folio contains inverse proportions of visual and verbal elements. That is, the

painting contains a legend in the background over the church, while the eulogy is placed within a represented architectural space usually reserved for canon tables or portraits of gospel writers (Figures 9 and 10).

The tumulus would probably have been displayed on the anniver- sary of Fulbert's death each year. In view of its commemorative function, as well as the dual meaning of church edifices at the time- literally as earthly temples, figuratively as icons of the spiritual Jeru- salem-we may well see the miniature as portraying the translation of Fulbert and his flock to the spiritual Jerusalem at the end of time, a spiritual Jerusalem here depicted as a triumph of the monumental architecture that Fulbert has championed. Rather than address the technical details of the architectural representation, I want to talk about the tension or conflicts in the levels of discourse within the work and the way they define a conception of Romanesque based on periodicity rather than on periodizing.

The whole work consists of a careful employment of visual and verbal elements, conceptual and perceptual schemas self-consciously emphasizing references from classical Rome in a new setting. The concept of the tumulus, a literary or artistic work commemorating the life of a significant person, is itself classical; the sepulchral monument serves as metaphor for the absent body (see appendix for texts).

As a cenotaph, the tumulus poses the problem of antiquity as a



138 Poetics Today 1 0: 1

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tension between two empires and two styles: the Roman and the Chris- tian. The Roman artistic formula, recalled in our examples here by the Roman arches, the columns, the basilica form of the church, and the Latin language, combines with a set of Christian elements-the ritual

space, the idea of commemoration itself, the concept of the pastor and his flock, the translation of the material world out of time and history to a spiritual Jerusalem, and of course the idea of the empty tomb as a plentitude of signification. The real drama of the tumulus and of the monument it represents occurs at the nexus of two opposing con-

ceptions of language: the Roman sublime and the Christian prosaic. Well versed in Roman conventions, Sigo and Andre de Mici render the

antique formulas adequately in order to mark the difference between them and the Christian formulas.

What is new in the tumulus, and what the tumulus tells us is new in Fulbert's church, is the scale of its tensions and harmonies. Ful- bert has taken the Roman monumental discourse, the martial idiom of the Roman empire, and articulated it in a social and vernacular set-

ting previously reserved for architecture of a much smaller and more

private order.7 The tumulus shows the appropriation of Roman discourse as history

in at least five ways: (1) the tumulus itself as a Roman form, (2) the Roman triumphal arch as the containing image of the new Christian

space, (3) the Roman arch repeated throughout, (4) the employment of Roman columns as a major element of the architectural discourse, and (5) the format of the titulus lettering deriving from Roman monumental inscription. But we do not simply find an appropriation of Roman discourse elements, as Gerville and others thought. These elements are redeployed as a tension between contradictory styles: sermo

superbus, the high style of the Roman empire, and sermo humilis, the low

style of the Christian imperium. The drama of contradiction shows an inversion of hierarchy in which the sermo superbus marks the triumph of sermo humilis.

We see the Roman high style in the splendor of the monumental architecture, in the magnificence of the ritual costumes of Fulbert and the aristocrats, and in the titulus lettering. In contrast, the controlling low style appears in the monochrome of the eulogy, contrasted with the polychrome of the illumination; in the simplicity of the language of the text and the image it gives of Fulbert, oxymoronically portraying him as an illustrious shepherd, "an intense light given by God to this world, supporter of the poor, consoler of the bereaved, a restrainer of

7. For examples of nonmonumental use of Roman monumental architecture (the triumphal arch) in the pre-Romanesque period, see Andre Grabar 1978 and Karl Hauck 1974.




thieves and robbers." By marking the monument with the tension of the high and low discourse modes, the tumulus suggests the freezing of history within the ideological context of sermo humilis. The tension between the two styles points to a third stage to come, a soteriological moment that will resolve the tension of history by its passing. The end of history will also dissolve stylistic difference, which is the very sign of history.

Looking beyond the ideology of sermo humilis, we should note the

double-edged nature of the asymmetries of word and image imparted by the tensions we have observed. The low and high styles, for example, are deployed asymmetrically in two contradictory discourses that in-

terrogate each other. Through them, the tumulus stresses continuity and memory on the one hand, innovation and discontinuity on the other. Both word and image hypostasize a moment of time that ex- tends the church and its human members into the eternity promised in Revelation. Yet by the act of parsing the New Jerusalem as a translatio into the Chartrain vernacular, the tumulus sets in motion a counter- movement towards its social context. It betrays, in short, an awareness that systems and institutions can be social phenomena as well as theo- logical concepts.

The tumulus demonstrates this in two asymmetrical discursive modes: an affirmative or authoritative discourse as continuity, and a contradictory or critical iconology as rupture and discontinuity. To illustrate authoritative discourse as continuity, we might look at the use of aedicule and arch, two salient elements of the architectural idiom of the tumulus.8 Here we note only the importance of the aedicule, while focusing on the arch. The arch, even more than the supporting columns, is the most pervasive single visual element. Its ubiquitousness suggests that it may serve as the sign of the Roman in the Romanesque.

Three main points will help us to understand how the arch the- matizes continuity and authority. First, the arch in the eulogy folio contains and fixes the titulus. The arch metaphorizes the authoritative discourse of the biblical intertext that grounds the meaning of the eulogy. Divided into tympanum above and portal below-separating the text into two parts-the arch visually relays the meaning of the first few lines of the eulogy: "On this day passed [migravit] to God our

8. The aedicule is a culturally marked symbolic form whose use tells us much about the way the society of a given era conceives of its architectural expression. Its force as an expressive form derives from the way it is used in particular contexts. The tumulus of Andre de Mici emphasizes the aedicular expressivity-the many "little houses" within the one-of Fulbert's cathedral. For a discussion of the aedicule and "aedicular interpretation" as a component of Gothic, see Summerson 1963 [1949]. I am indebted to David Robbins of Hanover, New Hampshire, for the Summerson reference and for pointing out its cogency for the Chartrain tumulus.

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father of worthy memory, Fulbert." At the same time, it equates hac die, "on this day," with the implicit in illo die, the day of judgment of the Revelation subtext.

Second, the architectural frame of the eulogy conveys the sense of dying as migrating, as crossing the threshold from one space into another. The decorated lintel separating the two spaces in which the titulus is inscribed shows that the day of judgment separates worldly from celestial space, and gives hac die its full meaning. Hac die-Ful- bert's personal day of judgment, the community's collective day of loss, the day commemorated by the tumulus-lies in the celestial space of the tympanum and so authorizes the translation from hac die to in illo die. The continuity of authoritative discourse makes the visual

image continuous with the titulus; each complements and completes the meaning of the other.

Third, the verbal text talks about the particular example: Fulbert. The architectural frame relays this meaning in universal and ideological terms by showing the division of the Christian universe into two hierarchical spaces firmly divided but linked by the exemplary "mi-

gration" of preeminent figures like Fulbert. Fulbert appears both as a universal example of the Christian commemorative message and as a historical personage: as Christomimetos and as Chartrain bishop. As

sign, Fulbert reiterates the continuity of authoritative Christian discourse and the continuity of Rome in the form of its commemorative icon, the arch.

The arch in the painting reenacts the dilation of singular and plural, particular and universal. We find the arch deployed in the horizontal bands forming the successive roof segments, progressively truncated in the three tiers of the west tower and in the roof sections and tower at the east end. The church as a whole schematizes the Roman triumphal arch, the one in which the many variant arches are expatiated. Not

only are the arches dilated asymmetrically, but the people framed in the arches of the main register are of different kinds and estates.

The conjoined forces of the church hierarchy, represented by Ful- bert, and the secular state in the person of Count Odo of Chartres and the unidentified nobleman next to him belong to the sermo superbus of the Roman triumphal arch. Fulbert and Count Odo appear in full

regalia, reinforcing the ceremonial image of church and state jointly supporting, like the columns that flank them, the Christian edifice.

The collateral arches remind the viewer that the unified world order of the central arch is also a social order dependent on the propriety of

place or rank within the polis. These collaterals contain the marginal orders: the women segregated in the nave according to custom, and the clerks on the altar side. The titulus over the roof of the church serves to remind us of the authority of the pulpit over the social order.




In casting the whole image as metaphor, the titulus dramatizes the

hierarchy of word over image: "The venerable Fulbert nourished the

sheep of God." We see, in sum, how the authoritative register reaffirms Christianity

as an inclusive philosophy, a philosophy of appropriation symbolized by the cathedral itself. Not only does it inflect the Roman triumphal arch in its architectural idiom, but it presents itself as a new metonymic system: cathedra, the seat symbolizing the bishop's authority, and ecclesia, the Christian order. This rhetorical system asserts a hermeneutic

hegemony over history as narrative. Cathedra and ecclesia are steps in the divine hierarchy articulated by pseudo-Dionysius and translated for the West by Johannes Eriugena, whose work was espoused by Ful- bert's great mentor, Gerbert of Aurillac.

When we look at the critical iconology of the tumulus, we find that the visual text proves asymmetrical with the authoritative inten-

tionality we have just contemplated. In fact, the visual text interjects hermeneutic asymmetry-contradiction-into the work. It does so by refusing, at least for us, to function as a natural sign, transparent and with a meaning predetermined by the texts to which it alludes. The image suggests alternate readings of the verbal texts and of its own narrative. In fact, the miniature allows us to bypass the accom-

panying and restraining tituli altogether and seek other narratives, other meanings. Critical iconology reverses the word-image hierarchy; it privileges the image to reveal what the word has chosen not to reveal. In this case, the critical iconology allows us to perceive the rather extraordinary emphasis on the local historical context, on the social details so concretely portrayed.

The emphasis on construction, on architecture, reminds us that even this early in the Middle Ages, church building was, as John James (1978) has pointed out, a collaborative effort of skilled workmen- laymen, not ecclesiastics. James (ibid.: 1) reminds us that

more time and effort was spent building ... cathedrals than on any other medieval activity. From their size and complexity churches like Chartres should be able to give us a priceless insight into the social fabric of those times.

James, of course, is talking about the Gothic period, but the tumulus reminds us that Fulbert's Romanesque church, itself an aggrandized avatar of Gerbert's rebuilding of Rheims, stands at the threshold of a new age of monumental architecture inextricably linked to social and political forces.

The tumulus emphasizes the social and political constituents of the local historical context. It analyzes the fragile political alliance of lay versus ecclesiastical and the hierarchies within each. Fulbert is indeed

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preaching in his cathedral in the painting; undoubtedly, the scene seeks to be pastoral, but it is no less a powerful demonstration of who should control the word. Paradoxically, Fulbert's preaching, portrayed on an official ecclesiastical record-for the tumulus is that-reminds us of the church's hegemony in that respect.

Fulbert heads the ecclesiastical order on the right of the miniature in accurately portrayed sacerdotal robes that specify his rank. Facing Fulbert in the foreground is Count Odo of Chartres, a benefactor of the church according to his necrology in the same manuscript that contains the tumulus. Fulbert and Odo appear as joint heads of the local social order, a representation suggesting harmony between church and state. But the same scene may be read not as two orders joined under the triumphal arch of the church, but as two orders confront-

ing one another because of the hegemonic claims of the embracing arch. The confrontation poses questions: Church and state? Church or state? Church versus state? The dynamic grouping and regrouping of the elements allows for indeterminate readings, each one of which

represents an authentic historical situation.

Ideally, Fulbert and Odo do jointly rule the secular and ecclesiastical order surrounding each of them. This in itself constitutes an authentic difference between the Roman Empire and the eleventh century. Under the Roman Empire, the church was part of and subordinate to the state. In the eleventh century, the church was autonomous from the state. Andre's painting shows church and state in their ideality as two equal power points in feudal society; it shows them in their difference from Rome.

It also shows them in their difference from one another, and from the ideal of world harmony. We need only consider how the miniature shows Count Odo surrounded by his followers and Fulbert backed

by his. Then we note that the meeting occurs within the cathedral, a metonymic symbol for the world and the universe. Such reminders

suggest that the statement is less one of pastoral harmony than one of pastoral hegemony. Quite simply, the miniature claims that Fulbert and his successors possess greater power than Count Odo and his descendents. It also raises questions about the equation of monumen-

tality and ecclesiastical power in the new cathedral(s). The tumulus thus shows thefaille, the scission in the structure of feudal power: the church-state conflict of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It begins to look as though this monumental legitimation of feudal power may, at the same time, be a monument to a crisis of legitimation.

Without any doubt, the representation of the contradictory forces in the social formation that illustrates so starkly the crisis of legitimation belongs to the symbolic schema of this work. Authoritative discourse




may be closer to our notion of what motivates medieval works-what we have been taught they ought to mean. Nevertheless, critical iconology exists as an authentic contrapuntal voice, the voice of the text as event, all too often overlooked. This discourse may be recovered by asking the right questions, by asking, for example, what is meant by the tensions and stresses within Romanesque art and literature.

If it so happens that the right questions are inspired by an awareness of contemporary literary theory, it does not mean that they thereby "violate" the historical integrity of the text, as some might claim. The tension between authoritative word and critical image, be it in verbal or visual texts, is an eminently medieval phenomenon that addresses an equally urgent medieval problem: the paradox of having to use a fallen language, marked by its own fallibility, to know and name the world.9

The imperfect language of humans could not, finally, be truly authoritative; as a fallen language, it carried within itself the critical mechanism for self-contradiction. This mechanism, which I have here called critical iconology, is nothing more or less than medieval discourse's admission that its power to name and to know authoritatively was limited.

Conclusion What we have seen in our tumulus as an opposition between authoritative word and critical image is really a dialectic that can mark all Romanesque texts, both verbal and visual, with a double rhetoric of transcendence and temporality. The authoritative rhetoric of transcendence appropriates and attempts to overcome history; the rhetoric of contradiction checks this movement, resisting transfiguration by reasserting the signifying value of the present in the shape of social forces.

Authoritative discourse is hierarchical; it valorizes political ideology in subtle ways. How many of us have noticed in the painting, for example, that the figures of Fulbert and Count Odo are equated with the Roman columns supporting the edifice? Having noted that, we might also note that the inclusion of the margins of society in the hier-

9. The tension between authoritative word and critical image does not simply mark ecclesiastico-secular relations. It also increasingly defines movements within the church from the eleventh century. Constable and Smith (1972: xi) recently pointed out that "the period from the middle of the eleventh century to the end of the twelfth marked a turning-point in the history of Christianity, and especially in the history of monasticism and other forms of religious life." This movement gave rise to a critical literature within the church itself, such as the Libellus de Diversis Ordinibus et Professionibus Qui Sunt in Aecclesia and similar works.

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archical rhetoric introduces a potential contradiction in the form of a commonplace so imbued with materiality as to be impervious to the offer of transfiguration held out to it by the work.

In the final analysis, Romanesque texts dramatize the dilemma of language by superimposing the sublime of authoritative discourse over the prosaic of critical iconology. The transcendent rhetoric of the tumulus deploys the Roman imperial idiom to portray Chartres, Ful- bert, and Count Odo as continuous with the Rome of Augustus and Constantine; the prosaic rhetoric reminds us that the commune of Chartres that built this new, monumental edifice in five short years (1023-28) was an economic and political entity very different from that of either Augustus's or Constantine's Rome. This fact suggests that Romanesque expression may be less a matter of style or form than of consciousness of the complex interdependence of social and political forces acting on and in history. Romanesque must finally be seen as a drama of voices striving for monophonic harmony but discovering polyphony.

To ignore the dynamics of discourse in Romanesque texts condemns us to miss entirely the creative tension of this art. That tension motivates the critical ideology of Romanesque representation. It is not the anxiety of influence that Gerville perceived, but the anxiety of

indeterminacy, the anxiety of contradiction.

Appendix

Text of Tumulus Hac die, migravit ad dominum pater noster bonae memoriae Fulbertus, suae tempestatis pontificum decus, praeclara lux mundo a deo data, pauperum sus- tentator, desolatorum consolator, predonum et latronum refrenator; vir elo- quentissimus tam in divinis quam in omnium liberalium artium libris, qui ad restaurationem hujus sancti templi, quod ipse post incendium a fundamento reedifica receperat, bonam partem auri sui et argenti reliquit, et disciplinae ac sapientiae radiis hunc locum illuminavit, et clericis suis multa bona fecit.

[On this day passed to God our Father Fulbert of worthy memory, an orna- ment to the priesthood of his time, an intense light given by God to the world, a supporter of the poor, a consoler of the bereaved, a restrainer of thieves and robbers.

A most eloquent man, as much in respect to divine books as to all liberal arts, who pledged himself to the restoration of his sacred temple, entirely rebuilt from the foundations after the fire, he used his own gold and silver and his knowledge and discipline to illuminate this place, and he did many good things for his clerks.]

Over the Roof of the Cathedral in the Miniature, Folio 34r Pavit oves domini pastor venerabilis annos quinque quater mensesque decem cum mensibus octo.




[The venerable shepherd nourished the sheep of God for four times five years and ten months with eight months.] N.B. The cumbersome numbering is typical of Latin poetry, particularly of Ovid, according to my colleague Robert Palmer.

Signature Titulus, Bottom Register of Folio 33v Ultimus in clero Fulberti nomine Sigo Andreae manibus haec pinxit micia- censis det quibus unica spes mundi requiem paradysi.

[Sigo, the last of Fulbert's clergy, had these painted by Andre de Mici. May the one hope of the world give them repose in paradise.]

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art and literature i || periodization and the politics of perception: a romanesque example

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