The Long Lives of Medieval Art and Architecture

Jennifer M. Feltman, Sarah Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351181105
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunstgeschichte

Traditional histories of medieval art and architecture often privilege the moment of a work's creation, yet surviving works designated as "medieval" have long and expansive lives. Many have extended prehistories emerging from their sites and contexts of creation, and most have undergone a variety of interventions, including adaptations and restorations, since coming into being. The lives of these works have been further extended through historiography, museum exhibitions, and digital media. Inspired by the literary category of biography and the methods of longue durée historians, the introduction and seventeen chapters of this volume provide an extended meditation on the longevity of medieval works of art and the aspect of time as a factor in shaping our interpretations of them. While the metaphor of "lives" invokes associations with the origin of the discipline of art history, focus is shifted away from temporal constraints of a single human lifespan or generation to consider the continued lives of medieval works even into our present moment. Chapters on works from the modern countries of Italy, France, England, Spain, and Germany are drawn together here by the thematic threads of essence and continuity, transformation, memory and oblivion, and restoration. Together, they tell an object-oriented history of art and architecture that is necessarily entangled with numerous individuals and institutions.

Part I
Essence and Continuity

Chapter 1
How Long Are the Lives of Medieval Buildings?

Framing Spatio-temporalities in the Study of the Built World

Nicola Camerlenghi

Let us—along with most of the contributors to this book—take for granted that works of medieval architecture and art have long lives. This premise invites us to examine a work over broad temporal spans and prompts two questions: just how long are the lives of medieval buildings or artworks? And when should scholars start and stop paying attention to them? The first question is largely rhetorical; the second is more pressing for it concerns the practice of our profession. There is no single answer to either question; more often than not, a scholar seeking to explore an object’s long life will frame it to fit his or her needs. Just as a biography of a historic figure might consider the origins, ancestors and cultural milieu of its subject, a diachronic study of a building or artwork need not be framed by restrictive spatial boarders and temporal limits.

The overarching challenge addressed in this first chapter is how best to spatially and temporally frame the study of a medieval building in order to capture the salient aspects of its long life. At stake is an approach that pushes beyond a building’s conventional spatio-temporal confines in order to generate original observations. This chapter begins by discussing the advantages of a diachronic approach to buildings; it turns, then, to distinguishing two major approaches to the study of their long lives. Though my contribution focuses on the benefits of a diachronic approach to the study of the built world of the Middle Ages, readers may find that these observations have implications for medieval works of art and for works of art and architecture from other times as well.

The conventional approach, which this edited volume revisits and challenges, focuses on a building’s moment of inception, with particular attention given to the architect, patron, social conditions, or even technical aspects that brought the building into existence. Since the birth of our discipline, architectural historians have been attracted to these initial, generative moments like moths to a flame. But, as I have argued elsewhere, an approach focused uniquely on that moment of origin has important limitations.¹ It tends to disregard the complex ways in which functions and meanings are ascribed to buildings over time, and the myriad ways that buildings trigger memories. More importantly, it treats buildings as fixed products rather than unceasing processes.

The diachronic nature of buildings has been examined recently in several monographs of important monuments such as Hagia Sophia and the Pantheon, but such treatments remain exceptions to more conventional approaches.² At the same time, important theoretical frameworks have been proposed by philosophers and semioticians who have been thinking about these matters extensively. Algirdas Julien Greimas and others from the Parisian school of semiotics have offered important insights about understanding buildings as ongoing processes. According to Gerhard Lukken, historian of sacred architecture and a follower of Greimas:

architecture is the result of two processes: first there is the process whereby the building comes into existence, and second there is the process whereby the meaning of the building is altered by the many uses to which it is put in day-today living.³

In general, architectural historians have been concerned with the first process— design and construction—and its principal agents, architects and patrons. The question of meaning, when addressed, is confined to the initial moment of inception. As a result, Lukken’s second process of encoding and decoding meaning in a building over time is less studied. But, to understand the complexities of a building (or work of art) it is necessary to consider both of these processes—a task that requires a diachronic approach.

In a drastically simplified understanding of Western Art History, we might reduce the sum of all artistic endeavors to a triad of eras: ancient, medieval, and modern. The first transition took place around 500, the second around 1500, though these dates will be contested as long as we subscribe to such periodization. Within the triad are myriad temporal subsets—including prehistoric, late antique, early modern, contemporary, and others. It is not surprising that perhaps the most extensive push for diachronism in art history has come from medievalists, whose very nomenclature places them in the middle of this simplified historic continuum—with an opportunity (and maybe an obligation) to exercise Janus-like vision and look both ways.⁴ This article considers buildings that came into being or thrived during the long Middle Ages—recognizing, however, that even to label them as “medieval” somewhat compromises the diachronic approach espoused here. Consider the case of Chartres Cathedral: is it more or less medieval now that most of the twenty-first-century restorations are complete?⁵ And what about a building like the Great Mosque of Damascus that was erected during (a time known in the West as) the Middle Ages, but which reused parts of a far more ancient site—to what extent is it “medieval”? Leaving such questions aside, however, the label remains a useful convention.

Two additional terms need some qualification. First, what is meant by the “spatio-temporal frame” of a building? And second, what is intended by “diachronic approach”? The first term regards the spatial borders and temporal limits that scholars use to frame their understanding of a building: where and when the study of a building begins and ends. A building’s spatial borders may be limited by its walls or outer membranes, given that we have other terms, such as “surroundings,” to describe anything outside of it. However, such a strict definition arbitrarily and artificially severs a building from its immediate context—are a narthex and atrium part of a church? Is the embracing colonnade around St. Peter’s Square part of St. Peter’s Basilica, or not? In the end, the precise threshold that encloses varies from building to building, time to time, and scholar to scholar. With that flexibility and freedom comes the responsibility to take into account the ramifications of one’s choices. Similarly, a building’s temporal limits may be restricted to the period between construction and destruction (or up to the present day, if the building still stands). Alternatively, it may include the design stage that precedes construction or—at the opposite temporal extreme—the reconstruction of a new building on the same site. Are Old St. Peter’s and New St. Peter’s, for example, not parts of some broader notion of St. Peter’s? Despite having distinct spatial borders—the latter is far bigger than the former—they ought to be understood as successive temporal parts of a single theoretical entity, which some philosophers would colorfully term a space–time worm called St. Peter’s.⁶

In Anachronic Renaissance, Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood deemed the reconstruction of St. Peter’s an instance of “substitution”—a process whereby an object or building is understood to be a reinstantiation of an earlier iteration and which could “belong to more than one historical moment, simultaneously.”⁷ The concept is useful if one is trying to comprehend one way that objects such as the Florentine Baptistery—believed to have been an ancient temple to Mars—or a woodcut reproduction of a venerated medieval icon may have been understood in relation to their past during the Renaissance. But the collective self-delusion that fueled this understanding of objects is, as Gerhard Wolf noted, “as much a spatial as a temporal construct, a dimension that has hardly been explored by Nagel and Wood.”⁸ In other words, not only time, but also place—especially in architecture—play a role in determining a work’s identity, meanings, material history and in conditioning its reception. The recognition of both spatial and temporal factors is a central aspect of this chapter.

We can turn now to parse and explain what is meant by “diachronic approach.” To this end, it is useful to consider its opposite: the synchronic approach. Instead of merely focusing on the moment of inception, a scholar taking a synchronic approach could turn his or her attention to the moment of destruction or to any single episode isolated from a longer history. This approach cuts through a building’s broader identity and presents a sectional view that, in and of itself, grants insight into the building at a particular moment. Such glimpses offer resting-state observations that yield important conclusions about specific times, but do not reveal a complete picture. Certain permanent qualities of the building’s history may be discernable in that single temporal slice, along with obvious ephemeral qualities, but synchronic observations tend to differ from diachronic ones much as a section drawing differs from a virtual walk-through of a building. Synchronic examinations can be parcels of a diachronic approach, but a series of synchronic studies does not necessarily make a diachronic one—it is not like pearls strung together to form a necklace. Instead, meaningful connections need to bind each slice in order to address not only changes but also continuities inherent to a building over time.

Indeed, a diachronic approach does more than look at a building over many synchronic moments. Those moments—what might be termed a building’s temporal parts—are means to an end for the scholar of a building’s long life. Any dissimilarity in a building’s temporal parts is an instance of change; conversely, any similarity is a case of continuity. When one looks at architecture diachronically, one is studying an aggregate of temporal parts that are themselves partial displays of the building’s essence or essences. The evolving and perduring essences—a concept to which I shall return momentarily—as well as the forces that push and pull at them over time should be the principal focus of a diachronic history of art or architecture aptly played out between change and continuity.

My terminology and mode of thinking about space–time and about diachronicity have been inspired by scholars of metaphysics, who in one way or another have been treating ontological issues of material constitution for centuries.⁹ Some of the more interesting work in this vein has been in the subfield known as four- dimensionalism, pioneered by Mark Heller and Theodore Sider.¹⁰ A three-dimensionalist would use the term “endure” to describe the ongoing presence of objects that “have no temporal parts, but are ‘wholly present’ at every moment at which they exist.”¹¹ In contrast, to a four-dimensionalist, objects like buildings are said to “perdure” by means of temporal parts that only partially display the wholeness of the object. A building, therefore, is wholly present only in the aggregate of its temporal parts. The distinction is more than just semantic: the four-dimensionalist approach is an invitation for scholars to treat objects with long histories with more awareness of their diachronicity if we are to approach some semblance of their essence.

A classic analogy for these contrasting ontologies is a lump of clay that is formed into a statue. The three-dimensionalist interprets these two entities as distinct, by arguing that when one exists, the other does not, despite the fact that—at least theoretically—they are of the same substance (a form of consubstantiality). In other words, the three-dimensionalist favors rupture instead of attempting to account for an entity surviving any form of change. This is because, without the added (fourth) dimension of time, any alteration presents paradoxes of material constitution—how could the clay and the statue possibly be the same? In contrast, the four-dimensionalist argues that the lump of clay survives even while the statue exists. To illustrate this point, we might think of the lump of clay as a long road, of which the statue is a mere substretch.

The architectural historian can readily transpose this analogy to his or her own e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Color Plates
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Why the Long Lives of Medieval Art and Architecture? An Introduction
• PART I ESSENCE AND CONTINUITY
• PART II TRANSFORMATION
• PART III NARRATION
• PART IV MEMORY AND OBLIVION
• PART V RESTORATION
• Index