Volume 49, Number 7 · April 25, 2002
Images Behind the Wall
By Willibald Sauerländer
The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany
by Jeffrey F. Hamburger
Zone Books, 608 pp., $46.00
Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent
by Jeffrey F. Hamburger
University of California Press, 318 pp., $60.00
During the last three decades studies in medieval art have undergone a radical change in direction. 'The delight in color and movement, and the expression of feeling that anticipates modern art,' which had been so striking in Meyer Schapiro's studies in Romanesque sculpture, have vanished. So have other approaches become relics of a bygone culture, for example the neoconservative dream of the 'medieval concept of order,' which pervades Otto von Simson's book on the Gothic cathedral, and the neoplatonic reading of 'Early Netherlandish Painting' by which Erwin Panofsky identified 'disguised symbolism' in many works of art. Stirred up by historians who asked for an 'autre moyen age,' as Jacques Le Goff put it, art historians no longer look back to a fictive wholeness of medieval civilization. They no longer admire late Gothic altar panels as self-sufficient cultural symbols. The study of medieval art in the more conventional sense has become as tedious as collecting stamps, whether it takes the form of the myopic interest in the archaeology of buildings, the 'Morellian' classification of forms in painting and sculpture, or the indexing of iconographic motifs. Publications on medieval art are declining in number. Not only does medieval art in general now get less attention than it once did, but medieval topics have become scarcer in college curriculums. How can one then speak, as some now do, of a 'new' dawn of the Middle Ages in the study of art history?
Review, 3163 words
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