DRAFT Introduction/Conclusion: Are We Still Being Historical? Exposing the Ehenheim Epitaph Using History and Theory

 

Corine Schleif • Arizona State University

 

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.61302/TZKB5241

Preface and Acknowledgments

The volume had its beginnings in 2004 when sessions on Madeline Caviness’s theoretical model were proposed to the International Center for Medieval Art for sponsorship at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo. Accepted for 2006, the sessions were honored with the distinction of commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the International Center for Medieval Art. In addition to issuing the open call for papers we invited individual scholars from as far away as Europe and Japan. Due to the overwhelming response, what began as a double session was expanded to five sessions. I would like to thank many who made these sessions possible: Alyce Jordan, co-organizer of the sessions and the chair of the ICMA program committee; Annemarie Weyl Carr and Mary Shepard, past presidents of the ICMA; Elizabeth Teviotdale, Associate Director of the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University; and the presiders: Evelyn Lane, Elizabeth Pastan, Virginia Chieffo Raguin, Ellen Shortell, and Anne Rudloff Stanton. Not all the papers delivered are re-presented in the following volume. Many participants had otherwise committed their work or planned for its publication: Anna Bücheler, “Bilder im Auftrag Gottes: Zur Konzeption des Wiesbadener Scivias der Hildegard von Bingen,” (MA Thesis, Eberhard-Karls-Universität, Tübingen, 2003); Kathleen Nolan, Queens in Stone and Silver: The Creation of a Visual Imagery of Queenship in Capetian France (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, announced for 2009); Pamela Sheingorn, “Subjection and Reception in Claude of France’s Book of First Prayers,” in Four Modes of Seeing. Approaches to Medieval Images in the Honor of Madeline Caviness edited by Evelyn Lane, Elizabeth Pastan, and Ellen Shortell (Basingstoke: Ashgate, announced for 2008), 313-32; Debra Strickland, “The Holy and the Unholy: Analogies for the Numinous in Later Medieval Art,” in Images of Medieval Sanctity. Essays in Honour of Gary Dickson, edited by D. Strickland (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 101-20; and Sarah Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). The additional papers delivered were “The Bayeux Tapestry and Nazi Germany” by William Diebold, and “The Crucifix of St. John Gualbertus: The Creation of A Cult Image in Late Medieval Florence” by Felicity Ratté. Maija Kule was unable to deliver her paper “Visualizing Women in the Latvian Culture” due to unexpected bureaucratic difficulties associated with international travel. Anne Harris chose a topic different from that presented at Kalamazoo. My own article was also not presented at Kalamazoo but resulted from my interaction with the other participants and my work on this volume.

Special thanks are due to Rachel Dressler, who, early on, even before the sessions had taken place, raised the possibility of establishing an online journal in which the otherwise ephemeral presentations could be expanded and circulated beyond the conference audience and more rapidly than is usually now possible with print media. She has acquired the support of the University of Albany and promoted the endeavor with her own efforts and resources, assuming the responsibility for those time-consuming tasks necessary for publication in any venue including copyediting, page design, and image reproduction. Different Visions will hopefully one day demonstrate that within the storms and urgencies that have been termed the crisis in scholarly (art historical) publishing, necessity can be a very nurturing mother of invention. Many thanks are also due to the anonymous readers who provided detailed and constructive reports on the essays as well as to my fellow members on the editorial board of Different Visions, Virginia Blanton, Richard Emmerson, Linda Seidel, Debra Strickland, and Christine Verzar, who offered advice and direction in initiating the journal and establishing its policies. In the course of the preparations of this volume a great deal of communication has taken place among the contributors and editors, many of whom have sought input and criticism from one another and to a far greater extent than that to which we are accustomed in conventional journal publishing venues. I hope that this is a sign of new modalities on the horizon that will one day supplant the current process that requires editors to persuade colleagues to join them and invest their time and research efforts in developing an anthology on a topic after which individually and collectively all must wait patiently for a thumbs-up or thumbs-down decision from a publisher whose proficiencies more often than not lie in marketing and not in the discipline of art history or in historical and/or theoretical scholarship.

Background and Foreground

The essays that follow adopt and adapt, explore and expand an approach to the medieval art object that Madeline Caviness has dubbed “triangulation.” The pioneering role of Professor Caviness in pursuing critical and theoretical goals provides the a priori condition for this volume. The endeavor is devoted to the methodology that Caviness first proposed in an article in 1997, more consciously developed in her book Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy in 2001, and subsequently articulated as a diagram in her e-book Reframing Medieval Art: Difference, Margins, Boundaries in 2002.[1] This project is conceived as a tribute to her unflinching pursuit of issues not only specifically historical, but broadly theoretical and sharply critical. Further, this current publication is dedicated to the work of those who have employed the methodologies espoused by Caviness. It is meant to address all whose critical methods have been denigrated, whose contributions, when theoretically grounded, have been refused for publication, or whose critical insights have been expunged by editors, peer reviewers, and publishers. For obvious reasons this remains a virtual community, whose members remain unaware of each other, but it may be cultivated as a conscious epistemic community whose members seek support from one another. In this vein, it is hoped that this e-publication will rekindle discussions about methodology and encourage those who see the necessity of using critical theories as well as those who endeavor to employ historical specificity along with postmodern theory.

Potential participants were asked to develop essays that employ the Caviness model, which triangulates between critical theories and historical contexts, or that expand, refine or even refute the model. Along the way contributors were given further encouragement to state their methodologies and approaches up front rather than to leave it to readers to analyze or tease out the theoretical frameworks that motivated, informed or facilitated their work. The essays published here were the result.

Notions of Inter-Viewing, viewing into, and viewing ourselves occupy the center of this publication. Kathleen Biddick opens the work of the medievalist on a note of enjoyment, including the capacity to incite curiosity and wonder. On the basis of an interview with Madeline Caviness, Biddick shows the person, the career, and the writing of Caviness in terms of “shattering,” “grafting,” and “queer performance.”

One circle of essays considers a self-conscious assessment of critical theorizing. In her brief reaction to the research presented in the five sessions, Caviness includes some personal notes about herself and other participants in an effort to show the dilemma that is currently facing those who engage critical theory in their work on the Middle Ages. She encourages opposition to what some have feared and others have celebrated as “the end of theory.” Charles Nelson’s essay grows out of years of teaching critical theory in a literature department and interdisciplinary team teaching with Caviness at Tufts, as well as more recent collaboration with her in research and writing. He first explains the background and genesis of the triangulation model in literary theory, and, exploring texts and images from the Sachsenspiegel on which their current collaborative research is based, employs speech act theory (a historically current critical theory, the right leg of the triangle) to analyze the subtle ways in which the text reveals the anxiety of the author/narrator, Eike von Repgow, with respect to the absence of his authority in writing this law book (a historical source, the left leg of the triangle). In the essay following, I point out the ways in which not only critical theory but also the historical specificity of objects and sources is currently neglected in North American art history publications. I suggest that historical contexts can be explored by using the material object and written sources in order to perform particular history through the anthropological approaches of thick description and emic recording or empathic storytelling. To develop these methodologies I address the Ehenheim Epitaph, and scrutinize underdrawings and political records. The juxtaposition of individuals clad in exotic fabrics and fur with a fully exposed Man of Sorrows invites inquiries within current discourses of gender and animals in society as well as those of postcolonial theory.

The largest ring of explorations facilitates views of specific medieval objects, works of art, or categories of works. In an extended version of the plenary talk delivered at Kalamazoo in 2006 and sponsored by the Medieval Academy of America, Madeline Caviness herself triangulates visual constructions of goodness and evil, particularly those related to race and skin color, as they occur in twentieth-century Italo-westerns as well as parallel manifestations in thirteenth-century European art. Expanding her geometrical model to one that is three dimensional, she views these two historical phenomena as occupying parallel planes, the one closer to present-day audiences than the other. Rather than claiming a cause common to both, she distinguishes the specific historical circumstances of each, explores the self-fashioning of the “whiteman” as a performative, and postulates “psychological conditions that operate as causes and effects in a cycle of fear and aggression.” Her close scrutiny of stained glass, manuscript illuminations, and wall paintings, including observations on changing techniques and methods of production exemplifies the ways in which medieval art can be employed to examine social issues on a very particular level. Anne Harris re-examines the Shoemakers’ Windows at Chartres Cathedral and proposes an alternative interpretation to this often-studied stained glass. Triangulating Martin Heidegger’s theoretical notions of “Dinglichkeit” (usually translated as “reality” but with emphasis in his thought on literal “thingness”) with the historical circumstances involving the shift to and dependence on a monetary economy, specifically with its implications for the tradespeople, Harris proposes new views on the self-reflexive display of the windows represented within the windows as discrete objects. Karl Whittington demonstrates the ways in which late-thirteenth-century physiological drawings of the female body are mapped onto an image of the crucified Christ. In so doing he juxtaposes diverse but imbricated discourses from the Middle Ages and argues that the designers and writers of these annotated diagrams were projecting a male perspective for their viewers/readers. Rachel Dressler analyzes the Gyvernay family chantry chapel and tombs at St. Mary’s Church in Limington. Using historical sources she demonstrates how Richard Gyvernay lacked many of the salient characteristics of knighthood but profited socially and economically from his marriage with Gunnora, his second wife, who contributed the manor of Limington. Dressler contrasts these sources with the material features of the tomb sculptures—the ostentation of Richard’s effigy with respect to the reduced size and inferior internal positioning of Gunnora’s effigy—to show how she was abjected in order to deny her significance in constructing Richard’s masculine knightly standing. Sarah Bromberg takes up the enigmatic early fourteenth-century prayer book known as the Rothschild Canticles, which, although it has attained canonical status and is now included in survey textbooks, has been the focus of very few publications. Bromberg poses different possible historical contexts and argues for various gendered and ungendered readings of the devotee figures, which play an important role in the iconography. Viewing the images in the context of the accompanying texts, she, for the first time, provides a transcription of the particular texts that she analyzes as well as an English translation. Martha Easton takes up secular images from the Middle Ages, images of nudes in books of hours, ivory mirror cases, and the sheela-na-gigs. Using the material objects, including signs of their use or abuse, together with historical readings of them, she triangulates these views with postmodern gender theory. Notions of the scopic economy
are of particular interest to Easton, as she departs from the often invoked notion of the dominant male gaze to include not only the homoerotic gaze but also the pleasurable gaze of the female on the female body and the appreciative look of a woman apprehending a male body. Linda Seidel returns to the Ghent Altarpiece and, taking up new formalism as her present-day theoretical approach, she points to one underinterpreted feature of Adam, his suntanned hands, and one completely ignored feature of Eve, the linea nigra on her swollen abdomen. By making ordinary objects appear extraordinary—Seidel’s working definition of formalism—she posits that Jan van Eyck was drawing attention to the craft of painting.

Triangulation – Among Other Paradigms of Art History

Caviness presents her methodology in a diagram (Figure 1), which, as CharlesNelson points out in his essay, is “elegant in its simplicity.” She proposes to “pry open” visual works from the past, not in order to get inside them and understand them for their own sake, but rather to expose them and let them out into the present world. By approaching the work obliquely from two directions, through historical sources and through critical theories, Caviness endeavors to disrupt the usual comfortable viewing habits of present-day museum-oriented audiences. She wishes to create tensions that are brought to bear on the object, wrought by the levers of two diverging viewpoints and thus to open the work up to offer new insights for today. This does not mean that the diagram’s intent is dogmatic or that we have here to do with an overarching explanation for cultural production, cultural consumption, or the place of artistic enterprises within cultural production. As Caviness explains, the diagram was conceived as a chalk drawing on a blackboard, that tradition that may still be the most effective interactive, mutable and discursive medium for classroom teaching. In my opinion the diagram carries added advantages not only as a picture serving as a mnemonic and didactic device, but also as a name with certain semantic utility. In this case a woman has not only developed a theoretical diagram and metaphorical model, but also named it.

Figure 1

Charts, diagrams, and visual metaphors have long been favored by art historians when promoting conceptual methodologies. Perhaps we are particularly prone to visualizing our own doing. To date perhaps two of them have had the most impact on our discipline: In the second decade of the twentieth century Heinrich Wölfflin established the long held art historical conceit of comparing and contrasting by proposing his five binary pairs of formal stylistic characteristics, which he aligned into an implied vertical chart, easily translated into the practice of projecting two images side by side. Using these polarities he distinguished both the shifts of periods, particularly the Renaissance to the Baroque, and the divides of topography, especially the Italian from the northern European or German.[2] Erwin Panofsky subsequently proposed a procedural chart with three levels: pre-iconography, iconography, and iconology to be followed by those wishing to expand art history beyond formal issues of periodization and nationalization (or naturalization?), in order particularly to engage in the new art historical pursuits of decoding the disguised messages that artists with the help of advisers placed into their pictures.[3]

To these I would like to add the diagram that emerges for me from my reading of “Semiotics and Art History” by Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, one that is only verbally suggested and never concretely articulated. Bal and Bryson first liken the artist to the neck of a funnel into which flow all the influences and causations of the work of art. In their subsequent discussions the model is implicitly expanded to that of two funnels connected, somewhat resembling an hourglass turned on its side. The work of art at the place/moment that it through the artist comes into existence or appears in the world can be imagined at the narrowest portion of the hour glass. Without dimensions, this point occupies neither space nor time; it is therefore imperceptible in and of itself. The funnel to the left of it can be viewed as the space containing all the texts, previous works of art, technical developments, artistic influences, artistic training and maturation, political and economic circumstances — all that existed before the work came into being that feed into it; on the other hand, the funnel on the right represents the diffuse trajectories of all the signifieds that emerge from the reception of the work involving infinite numbers of viewers, viewings, and meanings [4]

If we broaden our scope to include concepts, terms, and structural paradigms that were invented to show the relationship of  work of art to other forms of cultural production, the list of examples grows substantially. Panofsky, borrowing a term from Ernst Cassirer, described various historical systems for conceiving of perspective, i.e. recognizing, constructing, and rendering three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface, as “symbolic form.”[5] Later Panofsky asserted that Gothic architectural vocabulary as well as developmental processes were linked with scholastic thought through what he dubbed was a “mental habit” of the thirteenth century.[6] Somewhat similarly, Baxandall developed his notions of the “period eye” to demonstrate correspondences in material and visual products wrought by a given culture at a particular time.[7] Not to be overlooked is likewise the older structural diagram proposed by Ernst Gombrich in an attempt to show the various manifestations of a given culture as radiating from a common center like the spokes of a wheel.[8] The various attempts to adapt and refine the two-layered structure of base and superstructure have likewise occupied many Marxist and post-Marxist art historians as they have endeavored to work out nuanced ways of showing relationships between variously defined kinds of economic and cultural production. To be sure, all of the above can also be used to chart the historical course of the discipline and its ever-changing concerns.

Unlike any of the previous paradigms, triangulation makes the viewer of the present day its raison d’être. It likewise grants great agency to this current observer and thus it gives broad place to the authorial “I.” This place I would argue is not a self-aggrandizing insertion of authorial voice as some editors may view this practice, nor is it a result of overconfidence as some colleagues perceive the pronoun when it appears in students’ work. Rather it is the modest assertion that the author recognizes that s/he is not the purveyor of timeless facts and eternal truths.

At the apex of the triangle, Caviness places the medieval art object— not all of them, not all of a particular time period, not all that depict a specific iconographic subject. Also in this respect the diagram is less universalist than most of the other paradigms enumerated above in that it does not presume to stand at some pinnacle of history and pretend to look
down upon and survey either the essences of a particular period, such as the Middle Ages, or the essences of cultural production and the relationships of the production of visual art to other kinds of cultural production. The position it takes up is not that of God, operating from outside the space-time continuum. Thus it likewise implicitly allots much agency to the (medieval) work of art and its makers, designers, sponsors, audiences, and other facilitators. With respect to establishing or upholding various hegemonies, these works and the persons behind them can be aggressive and celebratory, they can be collusive and complicitous, or they can be oppositional and defiant. Often complex combinations of the above can be observed when pressure is brought to bear from two viewing sites, some of the positions negotiated others occurring by default.

The two legs of the triangle, the two paths to the medieval work of art, the two approaches toward opening the work and making it accessible have not been in the past nor are they consistently now considered equally valid or acceptable. Discovering and defining the historical context has long been a more favored pursuit of art historians, as reflected in the various charts and diagrams mentioned above. Yet, in the Caviness diagram, critical theory provides the longer and therefore more forceful and effective lever for opening the medieval work of art and making it accessible and useful to audiences of today.

The engagement of critical theory that we here espouse often runs against the grain, as Caviness herself laments in her response essay in this volume, when she poses the question whether we have reached the “end of theory.” I would maintain that the current relative disappearance of theory has occurred for a number of reasons. Our discipline of art history has established its footing as part of the “feel good” apparatus of cultural production and therefore has great discomfort with methodologies that are critical. (Historical) art with all of its presences that involve affirmations of (past) humanity, celebrations of (past) human achievement, and articulations of allegedly timeless human values must tower above all that is critical. Western art and art history were both born of sixteenth-century humanist notions of valiant individual artists who created masterpieces that superseded the standards of their craft and the purposes of their sponsors. Both the idea of art and the practice of its appreciation and history were further nourished by specious enlightenment claims of egalitarian disinterestedness, universal pleasure, and goodness barred to none. In a viciously competitive world, art provides the escape of choice, offering deliverance from and denial of the dog-eat-dog competition of the retail establishment, the office, the board room, or the bank, as a conveyance to a realm of (apparent) gentility and graciousness motivated by generosity and supported through donations and volunteerism.

Art exists beyond those tugs of war waged by parish pastors and large religious institutions that so embarrassingly pull at the heart strings in order to open the purse strings–those heart strings that tie personal piety to narrow interests entwined with ancestral national proclivities, ethnic origins, and class orientation. A reverence for art, especially perhaps the art of the past, including that of the European Middle Ages, which was only subsequently deemed to be art and which has stood the test of time, collecting on its surfaces the rich patina of looks, stares, and gazes that many generations of admiring viewers left behind, promises to lift devotees to those imagined realms that transcend religious boundaries and denominational pettiness,to provide that which is truly universally edifying. The cost and level of allegiance, i.e. membership fees, are graduated according to class and pocket book, ranging from collecting, to supporting museums and public art, to acquiring college degrees in art history, to buying coffee table picture books and posters. With such effective all-embracing powers to hail ideologically, art does not well tolerate criticisms that penetrate it from contexts external to it. Perhaps due to their apparent and comparative immediacy, works of visual art from the Middle Ages are again considered sacred images in a manner in which medieval texts are not today honored as holy writ and Gregorian chant is no longer perceived as divinely angelic. Is it any wonder then that interrogating the possible darker sides of visual images and opening them in order to view their intrinsic power is considered heretical and that deconstruction is perceived as the equivalent to destruction, perhaps even akin to the deeds of axe-wielding iconoclasts who destroyed medieval audiences’ sacred images in rages fueled by fear of the potential power of these images?

Are We Still Being Historical?

What of the short leg of this scalene triangle? For a number of reasons I would like to address the advantages, indeed the necessity of investigating historical contexts. Madeline Caviness has already put great effort into explaining the longer leg, that which stands for theory, which she favors, believing it can be used as a more effective lever in opening the work to audiences of today. Further, Charles Nelson has chosen to contour the history and genesis of this more important leg of the triangle.

My opening question plays off of Nelson’s question, whether we are being theoretical yet, a question he posed by turning around Carolyn Porter’s question of 1988, whether we are being historical yet.[9] With her query she addressed the then new “new historicism” of Stephen Greenblatt and others, who were, first of all, endeavoring to replace ahistorical formalistic methodologies in literary studies, which had largely been dominated by practices of comparing and contrasting works of literature only to or with each other, and, secondly, attempting to present an adjustment to historical materialist theories that had often proven both teleologically reductive and deterministic. New historicism promoted the inclusion of nonliterary texts in the discursive field.[10] Using postcolonial criticism Porter advises an even more broadly discursive historical contextualization of sources and voices than that employed by Greenblatt.

Written historical sources have long been my particular bailiwick, to the extent that I have often felt more at home in archives than in museums. To those art historians who have never ventured into archives and perhaps seldom search through editions of documents I would recommend it. We cannot always rely on our historian colleagues to do our detective work for us since the issues we pursue and questions we ask are not always those that motivate historians. Art historians can make good archival sleuths. We are poised to see through the ideological veils of those marks on parchment, words on paper, or typescript on pages since these are the materials of our own quite imperfect craft and arbitrary trade, more than are paint and glass, wood and stone.

As this presentation and publication project has progressed, I have come to recognize that the short side of the triangle, too, is increasingly threatened by current practice. I would see in Caviness’s diagram a far more urgent call for historicity than merely a balancing of approaches or a nod to traditional methodologies. Even if indeed the often romantic images of the past that pretend to associate visual art with its original historical contexts make historical methods less threatening than those that critically and theoretically question what appear to be the very foundation of our discipline and all that renders it worthy of public and private support, critical historicity is at risk. I would posit that in the last years, art history, including the part of it that examines the Middle Ages, has fallen away from its earlier interests in interrogating objects within their complex and contradictory historical contexts. Perusing the titles of books that are appearing from university presses and commercial scholarly publishers, I observe that studies painted with a broad brush and covering whole topographies and/or encompassing one or more periods and engaging wide general topics have come to replace the careful (re)examination of a specific work or group of works within historical contexts. Surveying the English language art historiography of the moment—especially that produced in North American—I apprehend a landscape in which the dikes have broken and publications full of shiny fullcolor digitally derived illustrations spread out in all directions, but few of them have any depth of specificity. Publishers targeting those lucrative so-called crossover markets for undergraduate textbooks and general coffee table books are rolling art history back to the ways it was practiced several generations ago but with few if any footnotes, which would reveal to its passengers that they have shifted into reverse.

The focused attention to and study of written records appears to be in noticeable decline. Of the many new medieval sources, which have come to light both on patronage and on technique that are referenced by English-writing authors of the last decades few have been translated and made available in print. For the frequently cited standard texts, De diversis artibus by Theophilus and Il Libro dell’Arte by Cennino Cennini both mentioned by Linda Seidel in this volume, we must rely on old translations and text commentaries although in recent years new studies have appeared in German and Italian.[11] Remarkably the situation appears to be more grave in art history than in the fields of literature and history, which have in the last years produced many new compilations and translations of literary texts and historical records including (auto)biographical writings. Moreover, the time-honored art historiographic traditions that persisted into the 1980s of including the original language and an English translation have not been maintained.[12] The situation for materials appropriate for university courses is similar. Although the University of Toronto Press, through the Medieval Academy Reprint  Series, continues to make three of the old editions of translations of selected sources and documents available in paperback, inexpensively priced for students’ pocketbooks, and Elizabeth Holt’s work is also still in print, many years have passed since any new collections have appeared that can be used to whet students’ appetites for archival study.[13]

The situation for monographs with a high density of historical information presented discursively can likewise be quite revealing. If, for the sake of providing a manageable overview, we limit ourselves to what we might roughly consider the Romanesque period, we can quickly detect changes in the books available for art history scholars and advanced students. Books centering on a particular genre, such as Illene Forsyth’s The Throne of Wisdom, which examines archival records, literary texts, and theological treatments along side the material art objects, are now rare.[14] Likewise, monographs such as Pamela Sheingorn’s The Book of Sainte Foy and the subsequent volume by Sheingorn together with Kathleen Ashley, which present translations of historical sources surrounding one work of art along with critical interpretations and theoretical insights (the other side of the triangle) into the ways that this object performed ideological work, are scarce since the dawn of the twenty-first century.((15)) The same is true of studies that pay careful attention to patronage in a particular place and consider sources while critically tracing and contrasting (art) historiography as Caviness did in Sumptuous Arts at the Royal Abbeys in Reims and Braine or as Seidel did in her consideration of the famous Gislebertus inscription in Legends in Limestone.[15]

Much historical and theoretical work remains for scholars studying medieval art. In many cases, objects have only been catalogued with the purpose of determining how each may formally fit into the larger set of like objects. With materials, dates, and provenance of works of art abbreviated as acquisition numbers and articulated as short labels, museum galleries filled with figures of saints or Madonnas or crucifixes often resemble a morgue with rows of corpses, each tagged with brief information. Once these works were part of a living social environment; they were loved (and hated); they provided a livelihood for artists and craftsmen, they served to further their donors’ eternal salvation, they participated in public rituals, they were the objects of intense personal devotional fervor, and they furthered, limited, or challenged social hegemony.

Caviness lobbies for “thick description,” a term made famous in an essay first published by Clifford Geertz in 1973.[16] The simple often quoted analogy that Geertz borrowed from Gilbert Ryle involves the motion of blinking one eye. The movement can be unwanted and unintended as with an involuntary twitch, it can involve intentional, unobtrusive communication as in a wink, or it can potentially be used as mockery or ridicule, which might even involve practice and rehearsal. At face value none of these instances can be distinguished from the others, i.e. a camera would record these acts as identical. Only the complex background of context can determine the meaning, and this is already reflected in the words used in the descriptive narrative: twitch, wink, blink. Thick description is not naive description or, applied to art history, the identification of every historical object, person, or event pictured in the image, i.e. the pre-iconographic level in Panofsky’s chart mentioned above; nor is it simply the unlocking of the historical meanings of each of the above, i.e. the iconographic level. Rather it involves the consideration of complex contexts to determine meanings. In some respects thick description is closest to the third level in Panofsky’s chart, i.e. the total iconological program intended through the image, but this would only provide one thin single strand of narrative and even then procedurally we would have to turn Panofsky’s chart upside down asking first the question of the larger historical purpose. What is more, the practice of thick description calls into question the validity of neutral terms, the very foundation on which Panofsky’s step-bystep process is based. Geertz underscores the necessity that every description is ineluctably interpretive. Thus the concerns that make up the short leg of the triangle and leverage the medieval object by way of historical context do not therefore pretend to constitute a unified and stable historical reality.

In fact, the endeavors of the short leg of the triangle do not purport to achieve any historical reality. The short leg of the triangle, in the German words so often used to connote a detachment and specificity separated from common everyday English parlance, does not claim to determine “wie es eigentlich gewesen [ist],” perhaps best translated as “how it actually truly was.”[17]The problem is not merely a practical one—that it is impossible to reconstruct the complexity of past contexts and experiences for today’s audiences, but it is an epistemological one–that it is impossible even to claim to know what they actually were. As a logical consequence it may seem that audiences of today should be free to interpret only for and from the present moment. But it is here that the triangulation model offers some caution against the hubris and chauvinism of our own historical moment, lest we think we are perched as it were at the highest point of the teleological slope of progress. I have paraphrased Geertz’s optimistic assertion, the last sentence in his short essay on thick description and altered it to fit the situation for present-day viewers of medieval works of art wishing to understand historical contexts: The essential calling of interpretive art history is not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others, protecting other identities, other policies, and other economies in other eras, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what human beings have seen and said.[18]

As we scrutinize historical contexts with a macro lens with the goal of writing for the “consultable record” we might do well to borrow some other precautionary methodologies from the anthropologists’ tool kit. Ethnographers have often argued the comparative merits of emic and etic approaches to their material. An emic approach to gathering information and writing about that information favors the use of terms and descriptions that are close to the experiential perspective of groups being studied, as opposed to etic concepts that are more distanced and closer to the analysts conducting the studies. Many anthropologists have chosen the emic over the etic on ethical grounds.[19] We as art historians of the Middle Ages, who do not deal with living human subjects, may have slightly different reasons to choose the emic approach. Allowing our historical subjects to speak with their own voices facilitates understanding across time. I am not recommending that we dispense with analytical terms of our place and time, but these belong consciously separated—on the other leg of the triangle. The emic underscores the importance of being able to access materials in original medieval languages as well as the importance of providing reliable critical translations of important texts or quotations. It favors terms that show respect for medieval concepts of liturgy, ritual and theology, governmental forms, and social practices rather than immediately transforming specific vocabulary into a historical yet non-analytical nomenclature. For example, I would encourage the use of loci sancti rather than “zones of veneration” to refer to the places inside and outside of churches that were marked with art work or performances for the celebration of specific feast days in the liturgical year. These cautions might serve us well in resisting the urge to ventriloquize while furthering our ability to empathize and our capacity to sympathize in order to facilitate the formation of virtual epistemic communities over time, which can prove useful in understanding the contradictions of collusion and complicity and in observing the complexities of ideologies at work in works of art. For art historians this may involve informed speculation and the risk of imagining one’s self transported back into a given (historical) situation. This does not mean, of course, that one uses the art object to wish or whisk one’s self back into the Middle Ages. Geertz writes that only a romantic or a spy would wish to become or to mimic a native.[20] With respect to art historians and the natives of the Middle Ages, the spy is the colonialist voyeur who subjects medieval art and artifacts to his gaze in order to control that which would challenge his hegemonic position in history; the romantic is the escapist, self-delusional viewer who compensates for that which she lacks in the present through wistful projections into the past.

In order to avoid both the pitfalls of determinism and the recuperation of stereotypes, I would also advocate the pursuit of “particular history.”[21] In many respects art history cries out for this methodology even more than does the discipline of history itself. History’s individuals and events have not survived, but art history’s art has. The materiality of the work itself and its formal qualities offer great clues to its living environment and the various settings it once occupied. These include not only its representational contents or functions but the substances that comprise it, the techniques and talents employed to create it, its self-referentiality, and the marks of use and abuse left on its surfaces, all of which can be employed not only to order it among other objects of its kind but also to learn its stories. These stories need not be chronological narratives woven as a chain of causes and effects, they can be constituted as (con)texts. Scrutinizing the particular, i.e. that which art history has deemed  insignificant and therefore ignored, we are enabled to find more than just countless new examples that fit the larger pattern. We can examine contradictions, complicity, compensations and negotiations. Particular history as opposed to universal history allows us to include the traces and reflections of those who resisted hegemony but failed, and therefore do not belong to any of the grand narratives of history.

In 1988 Carolyn Porter answered her question “Are we [literary historians] being historical yet?” with “no.” In 2008 I answer my question “Are we [art historians] still being historical?” likewise with a “no.” If historicism was approached and achieved somewhere in the time intervening, at least for art history, it was very short lived.

The Ehenheim Epitaph

The Ehenheim Epitaph (Figure 2) presents a welcome opportunity to engage in particular art history using thick description, emic concepts, and informed speculation to leverage from the side of historical context as well as to apply pressure with the longer lever of critical theory. Technical analysis, cleaning, and restoration has just been completed on this panel, measuring 113 by 102 centimeters, which has hung in the parish church of St. Lorenz in Nuremberg since it was painted following the death of Dr. Johannes von Ehenheim in 1438.

No archival records about this work from the time of its origin have survived. In fact, even the inscription portion of the epitaph, which in Nuremberg was usually on a separate board, either fashioned as part of the frame or mounted at an angle to provide a kind of protective roof, has been long lost. It is not included in the oldest surviving collection of inscriptions, that compiled by Johann Helwig dating from the middle of the seventeenth century.[22] In the inventory compiled for the church between 1823 and 1827, Johannes Hilpert noted that the panel hung on the first pier on the north side of the choir—according to the standard numbering system in use today, N iv. In the floor nearby, a bronze inscription together with a full-figure effigy, marked von Ehenheim’s final resting place until the stripping and removal of nearly all the bronzes at the beginning of the nineteenth century.[23] This grave assumed a most prestigious location within the church before the building of the hall choir, the position directly before the high altar and between the choir stalls occupied by the clergy. Even in the absence of any direct records from the time, a complex story—or stories—full of tensions and contradictions emerges from the work itself in its discursive relationships with other historical texts surrounding von Ehenheim and his contemporaries. Previous literature, including my own publications, has not made use of most of the edited documents in which von Ehenheim appears.[24] 

Figure 2. Epitaph for Dr. Johannes von Ehenheim, 1438 or shortly thereafter, Nuremberg, St. Lorenz (photograph: Volker Schier)

Historical Sources

Documents point to von Ehenheim as a potentially important figure in the power struggles between the bishop of Bamberg and the civic authorities of the autonomous imperial city of Nuremberg, who strove to name their own appointees to the prestigious
office of pastor of this parish. Von Ehenheim was named by Bamberg in opposition to the Nuremberg candidate, Konrad Konhofer. Not giving up easily, the Nuremberg City Council arranged for another well-paid prebend in exchange for the Nuremberg post, but, contrary to all expectations, including those of Bishop Anton von Rotenhan himself, von Ehenheim refused.26 It is unclear, however, if he ever took up residence in Nuremberg since he died about a month after he had taken office.

Coming from a family of imperial knights, Johannes von Ehenheim had the prerequisite aristocratic pedigree for membership in the cathedral chapter. In 1424 Johannes was appointed to this office through papal approbation (auctoritate apostolica).27 Unlike most cathedral canons, von Ehenheim had been ordained a priest and had enjoyed a university education culminating with a doctorate in canon law.28 By 1430 he had been appointed vicar general, a position that made him second in rank to the bishop in the diocese, afforded him many episcopal rights, and charged him to represent the bishop in his absence.29 In 1432 and 1433 he participated in the Council of Basel in the stead of the bishop.30 Many surviving charters and other documents bear von Ehenheim’s name and seal.

In 1435 he was involved in the Bamberg immunity controversy, which had erupted into armed conflict between the citizens under the municipal court and those in the socalled immune districts, belonging to the collegiate churches and the Benedictine abbey, and under the protection of the bishop and the cathedral chapter.31 The primary issues were the lack of a unified lower court system and the refusal of those living in the immune districts to pay municipal taxes and thus share in the financial responsibility for civic projects. Partially as a result of von Ehenheim’s efforts, the clergy succeeded in squelching the uprising and some important families left Bamberg for Nuremberg, a city that offered more rights and privileges to the burgeoning merchant class. It is thus quite understandable that the Nuremberg City Council did not welcome the appointment of this well known and powerful individual and that the council did everything it could to prohibit him from taking office.