Excavating the Medieval Image

Manuscripts, Artists, Audiences: Essays in Honor of Sandra Hindman

David S. Areford

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351158466
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Art
• Categoría: History of Art

Medieval images, especially manuscript illuminations, have long been treated independently of the contexts in which they were created. These beautiful miniature paintings, frequently valued as keepers of documentary evidence or as curious artistic commodities, have only recently become the focus of art historians concerned with new questions related to artistic working methods, audience and the status of the visual in the Middle Ages and the modern era. Excavating the Medieval Image argues that the illuminated image is best understood as thoroughly integrated in the material context of the manuscript - and thus, integrated in a cultural context of production and reception. Seen in this way, the illuminated manuscript becomes a kind of archaeological site, which must be carefully unearthed layer by layer. The fourteen essays gathered here are written by scholars of both medieval and Renaissance art history, and demonstrate varied methodological approaches that combine the pursuits of traditional connoisseurship and iconography with those of critical theory and historiography. In addition, the authors contribute more broadly to important interdisciplinary issues such as the study of gender, text and image, and the history of literacy and the book.

Part One
Texts and pictures

1
Portraits and counterfeits: Villard de Honnecourt and thirteenth-century theories of representation

Stephen Perkinson

Villard de Honnecourt greets you and requests that all those who will work with the methods that one shall find in this book pray for his soul and remember him. For in this book one can find great counsel concerning the great power of masonry and methods of carpentry, and also one shall discover the power of portraiture, the lines, just as the art of geometry commands and instructs it.

Villard de Honnecourt (c. 1220–40)¹

Here is a lion as one sees it from the front; and know well that it was counterfeited from life.

Villard de Honnecourt²

Introduction

Sometime between 1220 and 1240, a native of northern France named Villard de Honnecourt produced a series of leadpoint and ink drawings on loose pieces of parchment. He depicted an impressive range of subjects, including human figures, animals, architectural elevations and plans, and mechanical devices.³ Differences in the size and quality of the parchment folios suggest that Villard acquired them over the course of an extended period, implying that his drawings were the result of years of travel, study, and professional experience.⁴ Variations in the orientation of the drawings reveal that the artist must initially have seen them as a collection of unrelated images, each of interest in its own right. At some point, Villard decided to assemble his parchment sheets into a bound portfolio. He evidently evaluated the loose folios carefully, collating them according to a new conceptual framework. He reinforced several of the images with a pen in bold, dark lines, while scraping others from the pages so that only faint traces remained. Before the sheets were stitched into a soft leather binding, inscriptions were added – either by Villard himself or by a scribe recording his spoken words – bearing Villard’s own descriptions of the contents of the portfolio.⁵ By focusing the reader’s attention on certain images and ignoring others, the inscriptions stress the themes and concepts that underlay the images’ new organization.

An inscription at the beginning of the collection includes a salutation from Villard to his readers, along with an overview of its contents (see Figure 1.1, and the first epigram to this essay). Villard certainly undertook this project in part with an eye on posterity; his introductory greeting includes a request that his readers pray for his soul and remember him. The text and images moreover offer insight into medieval representational theory as understood by a thirteenth-century artisan. Careful attention to the terms employed by Villard as he sought to guide the reception of his portfolio enables us to recover much of the substance of those theories and allows us to analyze the manner in which they informed actual artistic practice.

Villard’s introduction makes several bold claims calculated to grab the attention of his readers. He begins by stating that those who study his collection will discover in it ‘great counsel’ concerning building techniques. Villard’s introduction also contains a passage whose meaning might seem obscure to modern readers. He promises that his audience will find in his book ‘the power of portraiture, the lines, just as the art of geometry commands and instructs it.’ This passage refers most specifically to a section of the portfolio beginning around what is today fol. 18v (see Figure 1.2), on which the scribe wrote ‘Here begins the power of the lines of portraiture.’⁶ The recto of this leaf (fol. 18r, Figure 1.3) and both sides of the following leaf (fols. 19r and 19v, Figures 1.4 and 1.5) bear drawings of human figures, faces, architectural structures, and animals. Each of these drawings (hereafter referred to as ‘figures’) appears in conjunction with geometric shapes (hereafter referred to as ‘shapes’) ranging in complexity from simple triangles to configurations composed of multiple geometric forms. The fact that the combined figure–shape renderings begin on fol. 18r – before the statement by Villard describing his subject as portraiture – apparently prompted a slightly later scribe to inscribe the words ‘Here begins the matter of portraiture’ in Old French and Latin on that leaf.⁷ The similarity of the drawings on both folios and the inscriptions of Villard and the later scribe suggest that the drawings on these leaves were seen as a group – a group that provides visual case studies in portraiture.

Previous studies have proposed three explanations for Villard’s combinations of shapes and figures. In the nineteenth century, Viollet-le-Duc advanced the idea that Villard used the shapes to generate his figures.⁸ In this century, Paul Frankl proposed that the shapes were a means of facilitating the translation of the figures into larger, three-dimensional works of sculpture.⁹ Most recently, Roland Bechmann has offered the intriguing suggestion that the combinations may have served as mnemonic aids, assisting the viewer in remembering geometric formulae useful in the practice of architecture.¹⁰

None of these explanations is entirely satisfactory. Several facts militate against the possibility that the shapes could have served as a means of generating the figures. First, Carl Barnes notes that close examination of the portfolio reveals that in several cases the figures were drawn first, with the shapes added later.¹¹ Second, entirely different shapes appear in association with extremely similar figures (e.g. the frontal head of the man with both the star and the triangles, Figure 1.2). Third, the same shape appears in conjunction with different figures (e.g. the star in the eagle, the city gate, and the face, Figure 1.2). The figures therefore do not depend on any one shape, and a given shape does not necessarily generate a particular figure. Frankl’s suggestion that the shapes were intended as transfer-aids is also unconvincing, as many are far too simple to facilitate translation into three dimensions (or even, for that matter, accurate copying in two dimensions).¹²

Bechmann offers a great many compelling illustrations of the architectural utility of the geometric shapes, and his hypothesis that they constitute a mnemonic system is in many ways the most promising explanation of the purpose of this section of Villard’s portfolio. However, it invites a critique similar to that above with regards to Frankl’s ‘transfer-aid’ theory: the repetition of shapes within different figures and the association of similar figures with different shapes would have hindered the use of these images as mnemonic tools, because remembering one of the repeated figures would not have necessarily prompted the rapid recall of a particular geometric shape (and any associated architectural formula).

Significantly, this is not the only place in the portfolio in which Villard provides examples of portraiture; cognates of the term appear on other folios as well. An inscription describes a depiction of a window at the cathedral of Reims as having been ‘portrais’ by Villard,¹³ and Villard identifies depictions of both a clock tower and a lectern as ‘le portrait’ of their respective subjects.¹⁴ The term also accompanies a diagram of a cleverly designed handwarmer. Villard promises that it will work as advertised ‘if you make it correctly, just as the text [li letre] describes it to you, and the portraiture.’¹⁵ In this case then, portraiture refers to a structural diagram.¹⁶

Villard’s examples of portraiture – the blandly generic faces and the schematic renderings of mechanical devices and building elevations – have little in common with the objects to which the term was applied in later centuries – that is, images of particular individuals, in which signification takes place through the representation of specific physiognomic details. Scholars have nevertheless noted that Villard’s portfolio contains another phrase frequently associated with the modern practice of portraiture. Referring to two different images of lions (see Figures 1.6 and 1.7), Villard twice instructs his reader to ‘know well [saciez bien]’ that his pictures of lions were ‘counterfeited from life [contrefais al vif].’¹⁷ The first lion is seen from the side in the process of lunging at a man, apparently its keeper, who attentively watches the creature over his shoulder (see Figure 1.6). The second image depicts a barrel-chested lion shown head-on, its teeth bared in a malevolent grin (see Figure 1.7). Villard clearly used a compass to draw this lion’s face – the contours of its cheekbones continue along a faint, arcing line to connect above the hairline, and an indentation at the bridge of its nose marks the pivot point of the compass.

Taken together, Villard’s statements concerning ‘portraiture’ and images ‘contrefais al vif’ have been interpreted according to prevailing scholarly consensus concerning the nature of representation during the thirteenth century (as, for instance, in Ernst Gombrich’s classic 1960 work, Art and Illusion).¹⁸ On the one hand, the abstract, geometric figures offered up by Villard as his primary examples of portraiture seem to be proof that medieval artists were incapable of, or uninterested in, producing the sorts of mimetic, physiognomic likenesses of individuals produced in later years. On the other hand, Villard’s claim that he depicted the lions ‘al vif’ appears to indicate that he studied the visible appearances of particular lions in order to produce his images. Seen in this light, Villard’s assertion that his lions were ‘contrefais al vif’ seems symptomatic of a gradual shift in western artistic traditions, away from generic or idealized medieval images and toward the direct observation of nature and the mimetic ideals of later periods.¹⁹ However, to date Villard’s terminology has not been adequately analyzed.²⁰ A careful examination of the language in Villard’s captions demonstrates that his images were deeply embedded in the theories and practices of his era. Indeed, his work stands as a particularly self-conscious enunciation of early thirteenth-century representational paradigms, which strongly preferred geometrically informed, idealized imagery to the sorts of naturalistic depictions ‘from life’ privileged by Renaissance artists and patrons. Villard’s language furthermore offers hints of his motivations in compiling the portfolio, suggesting that he saw his captions as a means of enhancing his reader’s awareness of, and respect for, his impressive knowledge and exotic personal experiences.

Portraiture

Villard’s term ‘portr...