The Gods in art-abandoning the kingdom of shadows

Andre Malraux: The greatest mystery is not that we should be tossed by chance amongst the profusion of matter and the welter of the stars; it is, rather, that within this prison we are able to draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.

…The Byzantine spirit survives the centuries of iconoclasm, the centuries of barbarian invasion. When the next major impulse of Christian art is felt during the Carolingian renaissance of the ninth century- the art of the illuminated manuscript and the miniature- it is certainly not Byzantine; but like the Byzantine, it is Augustinian in its theological emphasis. And like the Byzantine, it does not know external realities.

With the waning of the Middle Ages, painters lost their touch for myth, fable and anything supernatural. The Venus who appears beside the tree in this scene in Les Echecs Amoureaux at the end of the fifteenth century is so obviously only a naked woman that the artist felt he had to identify her with a label. Image:http://www.flickr.com/photos/23074701@N02/6445903509/sizes/m/in/set-72157628194993641/

It is an immensely diverse art, with innumerable different schools, ranging in a relatively short time from the Gosepl Book of Charlemagne, which could be the imitative art of some western province of Byzantium, to the Kells and Saint Gall Gospels in which Christ, the Virgin, and the apostles are “Biblical hieroglyphics,” and to the “frenzy” of the Gospel of Ebbo. Yet all, including the strangely fascinating Gospel books of Brittany, “express what cannot exist on earth.” The artist who painted the Saint Luke of Ebbo did not intend to represent a flesh-and-blood apostle any more than the artist responsible for the Saint Luke of Brittany, “who signifies the saint because he is not a man.” Luke is pictured with the head of an ox because this sacrificial animal is the saint’s traditional symbol- standing for the true sacrifice of Christ as well as for the patient bearing of a yoke.

—The coronation of Emperor Otto III, 999, from a Gospel book made for him
—…However, it’s not just Robinson. (Though one of the problems with this theme is that in English, since Cowdrey, it has pretty much been just Robinson. Or am I missing someone obvious?) It sometimes seems that Western medievalists only study the papacy when it’s interfering with or being interfered with by other interests. When the papacy isn’t doing much outside Rome no-one cares, even when, as I’ve remarked, Rome is busy raising its own secular ruler in defiance of an emperor or so on. And there’s so much work on Rome that this is bizarre, but still this strange gap in the tenth century where the entire history of the papacy as far as the textbooks are concerned is basically `what the Ottonians did on their holidays’, even though the papacy is actually becoming more and more of an international focus without even doing very much.—Read More:http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/brain-like-an-undocumented-sponge/

For all its evocative magic- “akin both to the stained glass window and the totem pole” – the miniature remains an art that clings to the book. It is made by monks for monks. This does not change until the great, almost spontaneous surge of religion in the eleventh century, when the civilization of the monastery turns into the civilization of the churches, and art becomes the common property of all the faithful. It is the great age of Romanesque sculpture, when Christ, “for so long the prisoner of the apse,” finally “abandons his kingdom of shadows and appears on the church portals…Rome decides that the last Judgements shall be lit by the setting sun. With the bas-relief- for the first time in how many centuries!- the figure of Christ rises outside the church. ( to be continued)…

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…Museum Authority and the Ways of Seeing
The museum acquires social authority by controlling ways of seeing, and the objects around which museal vision is directed gather meaning from their context within the museum. In Museum Without Walls, art historian and novelist Andre Malraux describes the museum effect where the very placement of the object within the museum creates its importance and validity.Anthropologist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett echoes this assertion: “[in the museum] objects are not found, they are made.” Museums do not just gather valuable objects but make objects valuable by gathering them. The museum is able to produce cultural knowledge by organizing how the materials it authorizes are seen – by controlling the Gaze. Read More:http://www.valcasey.com/thesis/thesis_effect.html

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