Romanesque Architectural Sculpture: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures by Meyer Schapiro;Linda SeidelReview by: Thomas DaleThe Art Bulletin, Vol. 90, No. 1 (Mar., 2008), pp. 126-130Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20619592 .

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|26 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2008 VOLUME XC NUMBER 1

meanings and cultural associations of mate

rial objects in the Late Bronze Age contexts

as they move from the category of gifts to

become commodities or take on the role of

tribute or booty. As such, "identities of the

objects," according to Feldman, "did not

reside solely in their physical properties but

were mediated by context" (p. 169). De

pending on the variety of historical circum

stances and the contexts of human interac

tions, objects held "oscillating valences

among the categories of gift, commodity, tribute, and booty" (p. 168), whose bound

aries were often ambiguous and always fluid. This intriguing perspective, which

highlights "object biography" approaches in

material culture studies, would have been

extremely useful here had it been applied to Feldman's Late Bronze Age koine corpus.

Instead, the reader cannot help but ask how

Feldman 's koine corpus of objects, which

was mainly defined by their figural imagery, can be accepted as a meaningful group of

objects if one has to make room for their

shifting identities as they move about the

world. Using a stable visual aspect of an ob

ject to form a taxonomy derives from an

assumption that the object's meaning be

longs intrinsically to its material properties but not to its social life.

In chapter 10, "Representation and Nego tiation in between Ugarit and the Northern

Levant," Feldman uses the content of the

greeting letters to explore the delicately bal

anced world of diplomacy among the "Great

Kings" and other minor/vassal kings. This is

indeed a world, as Feldman convincingly

argues, in which hierarchies and the so

called brotherhood status were never fixed

but always negotiated. Feldman emphasizes the predominance of diplomatic exchanges over military success in gaining higher ranks

in the interpolity network. However, she

does not do justice to the role of economic

and structural changes, such as the trans

formation of political landscapes. When

considering, for instance, Assyria's rise to

"Great Kingship," among other polities, one

must somehow take into account its ever

widening economic and political involve

ment in north Syria, south-central, south

eastern, and eastern Anatolia. It would be

absurd to explain Assyria's rise to power

solely through diplomatic negotiations and

military power. Feldman later turns to

Ugarit as a geopolitically contested place,

especially between the Hittites and the

Egyptians. She points out that the greet

ing letters and luxurious objects attest to

Ugarit's tricky diplomacy between the Hit

tites and Egypt. Yet archaeological finds of

hybrid artifacts demonstrate Ugarit's full

participation in the interregional exchange of "luxury goods." This in itself suggests that

the formation of hybrid objects in the east

ern Mediterranean world also had much to

do with nonroyal and entrepreneurial ex

changes.

On a practical note, despite the good

quality of the reproductions in the book, the complete absence of scales and the in

consistencies in the figure captions are un

acceptable mistakes for a project of this am

bition. It is disappointing that many of the

illustrations of Hittite objects, such as the

Alacah?y?k orthostats (figs. 68-72), Mu

watalli's seal (fig. 74), or the Yazihkaya rock

relief (fig. 51), were not provided with their

museum contexts or site information.

There is no question that Diplomacy by De

sign will be an invaluable resource for teach

ing ancient Near Eastern and eastern Medi

terranean archaeology and art, filling a

substantial lacuna in Near Eastern studies

scholarship. With the theoretical and empir ical questions it raises, it will most likely constitute an important source of critical

discussion, especially in graduate seminars

on ancient art and material culture. The

book also testifies to a broad methodologi cal shift in art historical studies of the an

cient Near Eastern material world, from tra

ditional structuralist readings of "art" to

much more theoretically informed material

culture approaches and anthropologies of

art, supported by the discourse of postcolo nialism.

?m?r harmansah is assistant professor of

archaeology and Egyptology and ancient Western

Asian studies at Brown University's foukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World

[Brown University, PO Box 1837, 70 Waterman

Street, Providence, R.L 02912].

Notes

1. Marian Feldman, "Luxurious Forms: Refining a Mediterranean 'International Style,' 1400-1200

B.C.E.," Art Bulletin 84, no. 1 (2002): 6-29.

2. For example, see A. Bernard Knapp and John F. Cherry, "Production and Exchange in the Bronze Age Mediterranean," in Provenience Studies and Bronze Age Cyprus: Production, Ex

change and Politico-Economic Change (Madison, Wis.: Prehistory Press, 1994), 123-55.

3. Comparable is the "intercultural style" steatite vessels of the third millennium BCE. Unfortu

nately, Feldman does not discuss them in the book. See C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, "The Biog raphy of an Object: The Intercultural Style Ves sels of the Third Millennium B.C.," in History

from Things: Essays on Material Culture, ed. Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery (Washing ton, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 270-92.

4. Alfred Gell, "The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology," in An

thropology, Art, and Aesthetics, ed. Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1992), 40-63.

5. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 6.

6. For a critique of modern archaeological taxon

omies, see Lynn Meskell, "Taxonomy, Agency, Biography," in Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt Material Biographies Past and Present (New York:

Berg, 2004), 39-58.

7. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans.

Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT

Press, 1993).

8. See Gell, "The Technology of Enchantment"; David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon Press, 2003), 61-86; and Marcia-Anne

Dobres, "Technology's Links and Chaines: The Processual Unfolding of the Technique and

Technician," in The Social Dynamics of Technol

ogy: Practice, Politics, and World Views, ed. Dobres and Christopher R. Hoffman (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999), 124-46.

MEYER SCHAPIRO

Romanesque Architectural Sculpture: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures Ed. and intro. Linda Seidel

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 277 pp.; 70 b/w ills. $40.00

A decade after his death, Meyer Schapiro

(1904-1996), the charismatic teacher and

scholar of medieval and modern art, associ

ated with Columbia University for almost

seventy-five years, remains a source of inspi ration and fascination. Schapiro has been

canonized among the leading figures of the

discipline by an ever-increasing body of crit

ical historiography. New volumes of his se

lected papers and lectures continue to ap

pear.1 The publication of the Norton

Lectures on Romanesque sculpture some

forty years after they were delivered at Har

vard University in 1967 is particularly wel

come, because they present his only broad

synthesis of the field and of his own varied

methodologies. Carefully edited by Linda

Seidel on the basis of a fresh transcription of the original tapes as well as Schapiro's revisions of earlier transcripts, the text cap tures the author's voice, his passionate de

scriptions, his wit and erudition. Seidel's

informative introduction to the lectures ex

plains their genesis and place in Schapiro's oeuvre and provides a discussion of his ex

change of ideas with the Harvard medieval

ist Arthur Kingsley Porter.

Schapiro's engagement with Romanesque architectural sculpture began with his mas

ter's and doctoral theses, completed at Co

lumbia in 1926 and 1929, respectively.2 The

subject of both is the sculpture of the

church of St-Pierre at Moissac, France, but

whereas the former focuses on stylistic de

velopment and sources, the latter, broader

in conception, includes a reassessment of

the rationales for reviving architectural

sculpture, a positive characterization of un

derlying principles of Romanesque sculp tural style, and a detailed analysis of iconog

raphy with reference not only to religious texts but also to secular music and litera

ture. The dissertation establishes a funda

mental premise for all his later scholarship: that form and artistic agency are the essen

tial means of shaping and comprehending

meaning in the work of art. Schapiro's breadth of approach has been obscured,

however, because his subsequent publica

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BOOK REVIEWS: DALE ON SCHAPIRO 127

tions on Romanesque sculpture concen

trated almost exclusively on style. He

initially published the chapters that concen

trated on style, and then he continually re

published the same excerpts in different

forms.3 Even in his erudite study of the

sculpture of Santo Domingo in Silos, Spain, discussions of content remain secondary to

an argument about the genesis of a distinc

tive regional style of Romanesque as a dia

logue between native Mozarabic abstraction

and the influence of a more naturalistic

style brought from neighboring Languedoc

during the Christian reconquest of northern

Spain.4 This emphasis might be partly ex

plained by his pressing need to counter a

competing vision of Romanesque formalism

articulated by his French colleagues (see

Seidel, p. xxxi). Perhaps more important, however, was his ongoing concern with con

temporary art and artistic process and his

embrace of Marxist ideas.5 All of these fac

tors led him to champion the artist's role in

shaping meaning and highlighting social tensions concealed by the official religious

iconography of the Church.

The present volume, comprising seven

lectures, displays a holistic integration of

form and content, artist and audience. It

opens in Lecture 1 with the crucial question of what motivated the revival of architec

tural sculpture in the eleventh century.

Schapiro attributes the decline of public

sculpture during the fifth century to the

disruption of the highly centralized Roman

state's artistic patronage.6 Monumental

sculpture reappeared on the exterior of

churches in the eleventh century in the

wake of monastic reforms, he suggests, be

cause the abbey of Cluny had emerged at

the head of a newly centralized order that

assumed the Roman state's former role as

patron of public art. The urbanization of

western Europe during this period prompted the Church to address a new lay audience

of townspeople, and the message of reform

was conveyed to them through sculpted por tals. According to Schapiro, public sculpture also offered "a place of free discourse," con

trasting with the more controlled interior

space of the church and cloister. This al

lowed, in turn, a greater range of subject matter and the introduction of "margins of

free fantasy for the expression of the sculp tor as an individual" (p. 21). He thus leaves

the listener with an apparent dichotomy be

tween ecclesiastical patrons and lay artists

and viewers.

Lecture 2 focuses on the relation of Ro

manesque sculpture to its architectural con

text. Here, he implicitly critiques the notion

of the "law of the frame" espoused by French

scholars Henri Focillon and his protege Jur

gis Baltrusaitis.7 Taking the central tympa num of the basilica of Ste-Marie-Madeleine

in Vezelay as his point of departure, Scha

piro counters that Romanesque sculpture was not "submitted to a fixed architectural

rule" but depended on the concept of the

field. He characterizes the figures of the

tympanum as belonging to distinct fields

arranged in a hierarchy emanating from the

central figure of Christ in a series of "erup tive" forms that break through the regular

geometry of the frame. He further contrasts

the stability of the architecture with the in

stability of the figures set in rotation around

the dominant center.

Schapiro opens his third lecture by pro

posing that Romanesque architecture, far

from imposing an ideal order on sculpture, was itself affected by sculptural composition. He further explains how empirical attitudes

led Romanesque sculptors and architects to

sacrifice classical principles. Examining the

facade of S. Michele in Lucca, Italy, for ex

ample, Schapiro shows that the height and

proportional relation between column and

arcade vary from one level to another and

are modified to take account of the sloping roofline behind aisles and gable at the apex of the central bay. Schapiro extends this

analysis to rethink the relation between fig ure and field, sculptural relief and architec

ture. His concern lies with the ways in

which the "meaning and values" of a partic ular subject impact the ways in which the

artist chooses to frame it architecturally. In

a series of tympana depicting the Ascension,

Schapiro demonstrates how the transcen

dence and magnitude of the ascending Christ are enhanced by internal framing of

the tympanum such that the figure of Christ

spans more than one register, whereas the

repeated smaller figures of angels and disci

ples are scaled down and compartmental ized in a hierarchy moving out from the

central axis. By contrast, in other kinds of

portals, such as those of Aquitaine, in which

there is no tympanum, the artist sees the

possibilities of responding creatively to an

individual architectural element. In the por tal of Anzy-le-Duc from Burgundy, for exam

ple, the figures of elders at the apex of the

archivolt conform to individual voussoirs, but at the flanks they begin to occupy more

than one block and finally escape the vous

soirs altogether to become vertical figures at

the haunches of the archivolt. Even in the

case of column figures, Schapiro contends

that it is not the architectural member that

restricts the form of the sculpted figure but

the artist who chooses to transform the

organic form of the body into a static, in

organic one. Columnar bodies in diverse

media convey symbolic value as the repre sentation of stability, reliability, and firm

ness. A willful deformation of the human

body is exemplified, by contrast, in the fig ures of monks performing menial tasks and

jongleurs or acrobats in historiated initials

of the Citeaux Moralia in Job (Dijon, Biblio

theque Municipale MS 173). Bodily distor

tion is conditioned by social status.

The subsequent two lectures consider the

content or "imagery" of larger programs of

architectural sculpture. Lecture 4 concerns

primarily tympanum sculpture and "themes

of state." Lecture 5 focuses on "themes of

action" and elements of realism in histori

ated capitals. Schapiro invented this termi

nology when he began adapting semiotics to

art history in the early 1960s.8 By "themes of

state" Schapiro refers to hieratic composi tions in which a gigantic figure, such as

Christ, the Virgin, or the local patron saint,

"appears in a rather pronounced, positive, central and large mode" (p. 99). By con

trast, "themes of action" refer to narrative

episodes, "in which we see things happening or changing." He cautions that the two mo

dalities are not mutually exclusive, since a

given subject (for example, the Adoration

of the Magi) could be rendered both as a

theme of state in which an enlarged central

figure occupies the central axis and as a

theme of action in which there is a continu

ous narrative movement across the field.

Having characterized "themes of state" in

general terms, he turns to four themes in

French portals: the Second Coming, the

Last Judgment, Pentecost, and the Ascen

sion. Examining the Second Coming at

Moissac, Schapiro offers a detailed analysis of how the artist translated the mystical vi

sion from the book of Revelation into a

concrete image. Though quite faithful to

the biblical text, the tympanum also alludes

to contemporaneous secular culture. Christ

appears, much like the elders, as a crowned

ruler in court costume, suggesting that the

heavenly court has been "modeled on a feu

dal court" (p. 109). Furthermore, the musi

cal instruments so prominently displayed recall the "musicality of the court" at a time

when the regional ruler, William of Aqui taine, was himself a musician.9 A more theo

logical emphasis is evident in Schapiro's dis

cussion of the Last Judgment theme at St

Lazare, Autun, and Ste-Foy, Conques. He

interprets the individualized emotional re

sponses of the resurrected on the lintel of

Autun as a visual confirmation of the notion

that each person will be judged as an indi

vidual. Likewise, the carefully ordered, com

partmentalized composition of the Last

Judgment at Conques is compared to a pas

sage from Bernard of Clairvaux's sermon on

Psalm 90 in which the faithful "behold ev

erything arranged in the most admirable

order . . . every one assigned to his own

place" (p. 116). In his discussion of the As

cension, Schapiro returns to the theme of

artistic innovation. He argues that Ro

manesque artists, spurred on by a realist

impulse and the desire to evoke the experi ence of the holy site, tried to communicate

in various ways the immediacy of Christ's

"disappearance from sight" in the eyes of its

original beholders: by completely encircling (as in Sts-Pierre et Paul, Montceaux-l'Etoile)

or partially concealing the figure in clouds,

leaving only feet or head exposed (as in Si

los).

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]_28 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2008 VOLUME XC NUMBER 1

Turning in Lecture 5 to narrative imagery in historiated capitals, Schapiro again ap

peals to notions of artistic autonomy and

innovation. On this occasion, he takes aim

at the "students of iconography" who have

stressed "the purely traditional character,

the genealogy of themes, their dependence on one or another well-established settled

type with which the artist works without hav

ing to re-imagine, re-conceive the scenes"

(p. 125). Without naming individuals, Scha

piro clearly refers to scholars such as Emile

Male, whose (still influential) systematic ico

nography insisted on the dependency of

images on texts, and Kurt Weitzmann, who

sought to trace common visual archetypes for families of text illustrations. Schapiro counters these assumptions by considering

iconographic invention in capitals from the

Moissac cloister. In one capital, Saint Martin

is recast as a nobleman on horseback, add

ing feudal overtones to an established ha

giographic theme. In another, David, kneel

ing to be anointed by the Prophet Samuel,

adopts the pose of a medieval monarch in

contemporaneous coronation rituals. Scha

piro also modifies Male's theory of liturgical drama to underscore that it is valuable less

as a textual source than as an index of lived

experience. Examining the frieze of the Pas

sion at St-Gilles-du-Gard, he proposes that

the depiction of the Entry into Jerusalem

against the backdrop of an arcaded street

and the introduction of a scene showing the

Three Marys buying spices to embalm the

body of Christ reflect the "realism of mys

tery plays" (pp. 133-34). This evocation of

contemporary experience as source of inspi ration for the artist is related to a further

advance in Romanesque sculpture: the ad

mission of explicitly profane themes. Sin

gling out fables and Arthurian romances,

such as those found in the sculpture of Mo

dena Cathedral, he claims that such imagery "cannot be interpreted in a religious sense"

but is justified by the fact that the cathedral

was a communal building (p. 143).

The last two lectures may be considered

pendants: Lecture 6 considers the human

figure as subject, while the concluding lec

ture is devoted to animal bodies. Adapting Emanuel Loewy's concept of "archaic" art,

Schapiro maintains that the Romanesque

representation of the human form shares

with archaic art of other periods a "process of reconstructing in memory, or in imagina

tion, forms . . . [that] cannot be translated

directly into an image in two dimensions"

(p. 155). In contrast to Loewy, who viewed

the archaic in negative terms, Schapiro

highlights a creative process of translation

that balances the "conditions of everyday

life," which valorize particular postures, ges

tures, and types of human beings, with the

"conditions of representation," which call

for a certain abstraction of reality in order

to convey with maximum clarity and intelli

gibility all the individual parts of the body while distinguishing its boundaries.10

Schapiro likens the figure of Eve from

Autun to Egyptian figures, in that the artist

has selected the most attractive views of cer

tain parts of the body and projected them

legibly on a vertical plane without introduc

ing perspective; the head and limbs appear in profile while the upper torso appears

frontally so that the artist can accentuate

the woman's breasts (pp. 156-57). At the

same time, he sees in the careful rendition

of the wavy bands of hair a typically Roman

esque attention to sinuous line and pattern. In analyzing the figural pier reliefs of the

Moissac cloister, he similarly highlights the

balance of abstract and realistic qualities. A

vestige of late antique illusionism, the stairs

at the base of each fictional niche are trans

formed into an abstract surface pattern of

horizontal bars in dialogue with the vertical

stripes of the figure's stylized toes.

Speaking of more general typologies,

Schapiro observes that Romanesque art has

no fixed proportional scheme: the body's

proportions are variously elongated and

compressed for expressive purposes. He dis

tinguishes between three conventional poses of Romanesque figures. One rigidly frontal

type, conforming to a central axis (as in

Christ in the Autun Last Judgment), is in

terpreted both as responding to architec

tural exigencies and as articulating a spiri tual state of concentrated prayer. A second,

more dynamic, elongated figure type, char

acterized as the "zigzag figure," combines a

frontal torso with attenuated, parallel limbs

in profile, bent at sharp angles (as in Christ

at Vezelay). Schapiro reads this pose as a

depiction of conflicted emotions and pa thos. The third type is characterized as "the

figure with legs crossed, who seems to

dance or to pirouette" (such as Jeremiah on the Moissac trumeau, Fig. 1). Schapiro notes that the Romanesque artist, in con

trast to his Greek or Roman predecessors, freezes the figure in a state of tension

rather than relaxation. This self-inhibition,

as he describes it, conveys great strain and

instability, and it evokes a range of emo

tions such as sorrow, suffering, pain, guilt, or even anger. Schapiro explores the associ

ation with guilt further in reference to fig ures of Adam and Eve in the Expulsion from Paradise, as represented on the reli

quary shrine of San Isidoro at Leon, Spain. Where a precise meaning is not clarified by narrative context, Schapiro suggests that

such chiastic poses might be understood as

a broader aesthetic preference, and as evi

dence for this view, he points to its purely abstract manifestation in a series of col

umns, arranged like crossed legs on the

church facade of St-Amant-de-Boixe in

southwestern France.

It is fitting that Schapiro concludes his

lectures with the animal body, because it is

emblematic of his predilection for the mar

ginalized, unofficial, or "un-religious" ele

ments within Romanesque sculpture (cf.

Seidel, pp. xxxiv-xxxv). Although he freely

acknowledges that certain creatures in fact

illustrate a given text, as is the case for the

four living creatures in the apocalyptic vi

sion of Moissac, he explicitly questions the

traditional iconographic approach that

would interpret each animal in symbolic and religious terms on the basis of biblical

texts and commentaries. He comments that

many other examples of animal imagery

defy such clear-cut explanations. Referring to the inventive hybrids that loom over the

twenty-four elders in the outer archivolt of

the south portal of St-Pierre at Aulnay,

Schapiro asserts that "we are confronted . . .

by a process of free creation of fantastic ob

jects with qualities of hybridity, in some

cases of the violent, and which go beyond nature or any text that is familiar to us" (p.

188).11 He then cites Bernard of Clairvaux's

well-known critique of "contradictory forms"

in cloister capitals as evidence that such im

agery was deemed "meaningless and waste

ful" and "of no religious value." For Scha

piro these images possess "an expressive value and quality" and a "poetic character

through [their] relation to human feelings,

impulses, the embodiment of instincts and

passions" (p. 191). Toward the end of the

lecture he considers instances in which the

distinctions between the animal and human

are blurred. It seems particularly apt that he

focuses here on the serpentine acrobat in a

capital at Anzy-le-Duc and the hybrid musi

cians on a capital in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral. These are Schapiro's quintessen tial Romanesque outsiders?the jongleur artists, who display a freedom of expression and a "play of fantasy" on the margins of

the sacred.

Rereading these lectures forty years later, one is left with the indelible impression that

Romanesque sculpture is an art of experi

mentation, in which meaning is shaped by the individual artist's inventive response to

religious tradition and local contingencies. One also perceives in Schapiro's analysis the

careful balancing of abstract elements of

design and expression with illusionist details

of reality. This is a healthy antidote to then

prevailing notions of Romanesque as merely a revivalist style or an initial step toward

Gothic. Schapiro's lectures also prepare a

foundation for many questions that are cen

tral to current scholarship on medieval art,

including monstrosity and the margins of

society, corporeality and gesture, and even

the concept of Romanesque urbanism.12

It must also be recognized, however, that

Schapiro's lectures are informed by certain

debates and assumptions that no longer have the same currency today. His critiques of iconographic traditionalism and French

formalist theory, once controversial, have

since gained wide acceptance. Of greater concern is the fact that for other key argu

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BOOK REVIEWS: DALE ON SCHAPIRO J29

merits, he draws on now outdated ideas of

earlier scholarship. His proposal that Cluny

played a preeminent role in the generation of major programs of public sculpture is

founded on the pioneering work of Ken

neth Conant from the 1930s; more recent

research indicates that Cluny was less the

originator than the point of synthesis of

workshop practices initiated elsewhere in

France.13 Also questionable is the notion

that images such as the "Disappearing Christ" in the Ascension were based solely on the desire of individual artists to incor

porate the experiential and the real, given the careful documentation of theological tradition that Robert Deshman has fur

nished to explain the same innovations.14

What is perhaps most difficult to accept is

Schapiro's projection of the modern artist's

mentality back into the Romanesque. Al

though individual artists certainly forged distinctive styles and made particular aes

thetic choices, it is also true that the artist

was hardly the autonomous individual that

Schapiro makes him out to be.15 Roman

esque sculptors worked on specific projects for institutional patrons, and they usually collaborated as part of larger workshops that worked for affiliated institutions within

a given region.16 And since most Roman

esque artists either belonged to monastic

communities or, at the very least, professed the Christian faith, Schapiro's emphasis on

artistic fantasy and "unreligious" attitudes

seems misplaced.17 His notion of the artist

is also predicated on an anachronistic no

tion of the particularity of the individual; recent research has shown that medieval

writers stressed the ways in which the indi

vidual was tied to group identity and social

roles, or "imprinted" with ideal spiritual models.18

Schapiro's view of the Romanesque artist

goes hand in hand with his tendency to

downplay ritual and religious meanings of

Romanesque sculpture. He sets artificial

boundaries between clerical patrons and lay artists and viewers, and between the public exterior and interior ritual space of the

church. He thus describes portal sculpture as addressing a lay public but neglects the

role of monastic or clerical audiences for

the same imagery, and he implies that ritual

functions were confined to the church inte

rior. This view is contradicted by extensive

documentation of public processions and

other rituals that regularly blurred distinc

tions between "public" and "sacred space."19

Similarly, Schapiro interprets Saint Bernard

of Clairvaux as condemning monstrous im

ages in the cloister as "un-religious" fantasy,

yet it is clear from the broader context of

the Apologia that Bernard's primary concern

is not with meaning but with the problem of art as distraction.20 Schapiro himself is

aware of the frequent use of monstrous met

aphors for conflicted human behavior but

explains them exclusively in terms of ex

1 Abbey of St-Pierre, Moissac, south

porch, east side of trumeau, detail

showing Jeremiah (photograph by the author)

pressive potential (p. 190). He ignores the fact that monsters appear in monastic litera

ture and ritual texts as metaphors for spiri tual deformity and manifestation of diabolic

possession. Likewise, in concentrating on

the concept of fantasy as the sign of artistic

creativity, he neglects the wide range of

meanings ascribed to fantasy in medieval

literature on dreams and the perception of

the spirit world.21

Current research on medieval art es

pouses an approach in which religion, rit

ual, and spirituality play central roles along side worldly concerns.22 This necessitates

not a repudiation of Schapiro's method but

rather its extension. His close reading of

the visual language of Romanesque sculp ture can be complemented by a contextual

analysis that takes into account the preva lent monastic culture and rituals of the

sponsoring institutions as well as the re

sponse of its diverse audiences, both lay and

religious.23 Recent discussions of medieval

"visuality" and the sensory responses to Ro

manesque sculpture further suggest ways in

which we might historicize what Schapiro intuited through the eyes of modern art

ists.24 Although the period of Romanesque

sculpture lacks the systematic, scientific the

ories of vision developed after 1200, theo

logical, literary, and ritual texts of the

twelfth century make it clear that there was

a heightened interest in the capacity of vi

sion to convey more than the realm of ap

pearances; seeing was understood as an in

teractive and affective process that impacted one's inner being.25 In the religious sphere,

during the very period in which Roman

esque architectural sculpture flourished, monastic writers encouraged both the reli

gious and the laity to engage all of the

senses in a process of imaginative visualiza

tion as a primary means of meditating on,

and experiencing more fully, the presence of the incarnate Christ.26 The most com

mon stimuli for the religious imagination took the shape of sculpted crucifixes and

figures of the Madonna and Child,27 but it

is in the narrative sculpture of church por tals and cloister capitals that we find direct

parallels for the invitation to reexperience the human lives of Christ and the saints

with all the senses. Indeed, a number of re

cent studies have called attention to the tac

tile and sensual qualities of Romanesque relief sculpture: to its representation of

space and the acts of seeing and touching as the means of fostering the viewer's empa

thy.28 We can hardly fault Schapiro for not

pursuing such approaches, which are the

product of a fruitful interdisciplinary ex

change in art history and medieval and reli

gious studies from the later twentieth cen

tury. What makes the Norton Lectures still

worth reading forty years later is Schapiro's unrivaled ability to characterize Roman

esque as an innovative, and often experi mental, artistic language in which form is

inseparable from meaning.

thomas dale is professor of art history at the

University of Wisconsin-Madison [Department of Art History, Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, 800

University Avenue, Madison, Wis. 53705-1479].

Notes

1. Critical assessment of Schapiro began before his death with two collections: "On the Work of Meyer Schapiro," Social Research 45, no. 4

(1978): 6-175; and a special issue of Oxford Art Journal 17 (1994). Recent reevaluations include Enrico Castelnuovo, Roland Recht, and Robert A. Maxwell, "Meyer Schapiro et la

sculpture romane: Questions autour d'une

non-reception en France," Perspective: La Revue de TINHA (Institut National de l'Histoire de

l'Art) 1 (2006): 80-96; and Andrew Heming way, "Meyer Schapiro: Marxism, Science and

Art," in Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left (London: Pluto

Press, 2006), 123-42.

2. Meyer Schapiro, "The Sculptures of Moissac"

(master's thesis, Columbia University, 1926); and idem, "The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac" (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1935; submitted 1929).

3. Meyer Schapiro, "The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac," Art Bulletin 13, no. 3 (1931): 248-351; and no. 4 (1931): 464-531; re

printed in Schapiro, Romanesque Art, Selected

Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1977), 131-264; and as Schapiro, The Romanesque

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.192 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 12:35:58 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

130 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2008 VOLUME XC NUMBER 1

Sculpture of Moissac (New York: George Bra

ziller, 1985).

4. Meyer Schapiro, "From Mozarabic to Ro

manesque in Silos," in Romanesque Art, 28-101.

5. For his engagement with contemporary art and its impact on his interpretation of Roman

esque, see Michael Camille, "'How New York Stole the Idea of Romanesque Art': Medieval, Modern and Postmodern in Meyer Schapiro," Oxford Art Journal 17, no. 1 (1994): 65-75; David Rosand, "Meyer Schapiro," in Encyclope dia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. 4, 215-20; and Jed Perl, "The Varieties of Artistic Experi ence," New Republic Online, October 20, 2006,

http://www.tnr.com/coprint.mhtml?o= 20061030&s=perl03006. On Schapiro's Marx

ism, see Hemingway, "Meyer Schapiro"; and Otto Karl Werckmeister, "Jugglers in the

Monastery," Oxford Art Journal 17, no. 1

(1994): 60-64.

6. Schapiro, "Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac"

(1935), 176-93.

7. Meyer Schapiro, "On Geometrical Schema tism in Romanesque Art" (1932), in Ro

manesque Art, 265-84.

8. Meyer Schapiro, Words and Pictures: On the Lit eral and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text

(The Hague: Mouton, 1973).

9. Schapiro, "Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac"

(1935), 273-320.

10. Hemingway, "Meyer Schapiro," 124-26.

11. Meyer Schapiro, "On the Aesthetic Attitude in Medieval Art" (1947), in Romanesque Art, 1-27.

12. On monstrosity and the margins, see, for ex

ample, Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The

Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). On gesture and bodily movements, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, La raison des gestes dans VOccident medieval (Paris: Gallimard, 1990); and, more

recently, Kirk Ambrose, The Nave Sculpture of Vezelay: The Art of Monastic Viewing (Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 2006), 17-37. For

Romanesque urbanism, see Robert A. Max

well, The Art of Medieval Urbanism: Parthenay in

Romanesque Aquitaine (University Park: Penn

sylvania State University Press, 2007).

13. See C. Edson Armi, Masons and Sculptors in

Romanesque Burgundy (University Park: Penn

sylvania State University Press, 1983).

14. Robert Deshman, "Another Look at the Dis

appearing Christ: Corporeal and Spiritual Vi sion in Early Medieval Images," Art Bulletin 79, no. 3 (1997): 518-46.

15. For a recent deconstruction of modern myths of the Romanesque sculptor as artistic person

ality, see Linda Seidel, Legends in Limestone:

Lazarus, Gislebertus and the Cathedral of Autun

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999),

esp. 1-32.

16. For medieval workshops, see the essays in Ar

tistes, artisans et production artistique au Moyen

Age: Colloque international, ed. Xavier Barral i

Altet, 3 vols. (Paris: Picard, 1986-90).

17. For the documentation of Romanesque artists within the ranks of the clergy and monastic communities and their own capacities as theo

logians and iconographers, see Piotr Skubiszew

ski, "L'intellectuel et l'artiste face ? l'oeuvre ?

l'epoque romane," in Le travail au Moyen Age: Une approche interdisciplinaire, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse and Colette Muraille-Samaran (Lou vain-la-Neuve: Institut d'Etudes Medievales de

l'Universite Catholique de Louvain, 1990), 263-321; and Jean Wirth, L'image ? lepoque romane (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1999), 61-72.

18. See most recently Brigitte Bedos-Rezak and

Dominique Iogna-Prat, eds., L'individu au

Moyen Age: Individuation et individualisation avant la modernite (Paris: Aubier, 2005).

19. For example, Margot Fassler, "Liturgy and Sacred History in the Twelfth-Century Tym pana at Chartres," Art Bulletin 75, no. 3

(1993): 499-520.

20. See Conrad Rudolph, The "Things of Greater

Importance": Bernard of Clairvaux's Apologia and the Medieval Attitude toward Art (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990).

21. See Thomas E. A. Dale, "Monsters, Corporeal Deformities, and Phantasms in the Cloister of

St-Michel-de-Cuxa," Art Bulletin 83, no. 3

(2001): 402-36.

22. For example, see Jeffrey Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouche, eds., The Mind's Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

23. Ilene H. Forsyth, "Narrative at Moissac: Scha

piro's Legacy," Gesta 41, no. 2 (2002): 71-93.

24. On visuality, see the essays by Cynthia Hahn and Madeline Caviness in A Companion to Me dieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern

Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Oxford: Black

well, 2006), 44-64, 65-85. See also Linda Sei

del, "Medieval Cloister Carving and Monastic

Mentalite," in The Medieval Monastery, ed. An drew MacLeish (St. Cloud, Minn.: North Star Press of St. Cloud, 1988), 1-16; and Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo, "Touch Me, See Me: The Emmaus and Thomas Reliefs in the Cloister of Silos," in Spanish Medieval Art, New Ap proaches and Studies, ed. Colum Hourihane

(Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publica

tions, in press).

25. See Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2002).

26. Recent studies on monastic practices of imagi native visualization and the valorization of the

physical senses include David F. Appleby, "The Priority of Sight according to Peter the

Venerable," Medieval Studies 60 (1998): 123

57; Jeffrey Hamburger, Saint John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theol

ogy (Berkeley: University of California Press,

2002), 185-201; Barbara Newman, "What Did It Mean to Say T Saw'? The Clash between

Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture," Speculum SO, no. 1 (2005): 1-43; and

Ambrose, Nave Sculpture of Vezelay, esp. 34-37.

27. See Sara Lipton, '"The Sweet Lean of His Head': Writing about Looking at the Crucifix in the High Middle Ages," Speculum 80, no. 4

(2005): 1172-208; and Ilene H. Forsyth, The Throne of Wisdom: Wood Sculptures of the Ma donna in Romanesque France (Princeton: Prince ton University Press, 1972), esp. 32-60.

28. For example, see Seidel, "Medieval Cloister

Carving" ; Ilene H. Forsyth, "Permutations of

Cluny-Paradigms at Savigny: Problems of His toriation in Rhone Valley Sculpture," in Stu dien zur Geschichte der europ?ische Skulptur im

12./13. Jahrhundert, ed. Herbert Beck and Ker

stin Hengevoss-D?rkop (Frankfurt: Heinrich,

1994), 335-49; and Valdez del ?lamo, "Touch

Me, See Me."

ERNST J. GRUBE AND JEREMY

JOHNS The Painted Ceilings of the Cappella Palatina Genoa: Bruschettini Foundation for

Islamic and Asian Art; New York: East

West Foundation, 2005. 518 pp.; 200

color ills., 762 b/w. $195.00

The Cappella Palatina in Palermo, com

pleted sometime in the middle of the

twelfth century (there is some discussion

about the exact sequence of its construction

and decoration, about which more will be

said shortly), is without doubt one of the

most unusual monuments of medieval art.

With its Latin shape, Byzantine mosaics, and

an Islamic muqarnas (stalactite) ceiling cov

ered with paintings, it seems to reflect a sort

of ecumenical political and cultural inten

tion fitting nicely with the unfulfilled ideals of our own times and vaguely suggesting that Norman Sicily, at least under Roger II

and his son William I, prefigured the

equally idealized convivencia of fourteenth

century Spain. From the point of view of

our own century, such a notion may be rea

sonable, and perhaps even proper, and it is

easy enough to depict twelfth-century Nor

man culture as a model in which economic

and political ambitions overwhelmed sectar

ian antagonisms and to see Roger II and his

son as enlightened rulers of a multiethnic

state. An art historian may even find it mor

ally rewarding to interpret a monument of

visual effectiveness as the illustration of po litical and cultural harmony.

In reality, however, matters are much

more complex and far less rosy. In fact,

much recent, and not so recent, scholarship has dissected the Norman twelfth century, and especially the royal chapel in Palermo,

into masses of often contradictory compo nents. The bibliography of the book under

review takes up 212 pages and is divided

into ten sections. I am sure that it is as com

plete as can be, although out of sheer or

neriness, I hope that graduate student semi

nar reports, the only collective exercise in

which this bibliography can truly be exam

ined and exploited, will uncover significant

missing contributions to our knowledge of

Norman Sicily and to the arts of the time.

In the meantime, I will stick by the many

fairly recent studies by Ernst Kitzinger, Wil

liam Tronzo, and Jeremy Johns that argue that the chapel was built in 1140 but its dec

oration not completed until the 1150s, that

the peculiarities of the plan and elevation as

well as of the decoration reflect the ceremo

nial practices, taste, and ideological pre tenses of two rulers rather than a call to ec

umenical values, and that there is no

necessity to assume a single coherent plan for the building and its decoration. While it

is obvious that the 1140 chapel had a ceil

ing, it was not necessarily the muqarnas ceil

ing we see there now, which could easily have replaced some earlier and simpler cov

ering device, perhaps a vault.

Leaving aside the complicated problems of the exact sequencing of construction and

decoration and of the royal ideologies ex

pressed in the relation of the chapel to the

palace, the two largest bodies of visual docu

ments presented by the building itself are

the Christian mosaics of the walls and

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