Every Period Gets the Medievalism It Deserves

‘Perhaps the greatest paradox of twentieth-century medieval studies was its curious refusal to examine its own role in the shaping the critical languages of modernity’, observed Bruce Holsinger in 2005. And the role of medieval studies was crucial. George Bataille was trained as a medievalist and, while working as an archivist in the Bibliothèque Nationale, he wrote a great number of articles on chivalry and feudalism before publishing his Histoire de l'Oeil (Story of the Eye) in 1928. His great friend Jacques Lacan used the literary motif of courtly love in his Seminar VII, while Pierre Bourdieu busied himself with translating Erwin Panofsky's classic study Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951) into French, and Foucault tailored Panofsky's distinction between monument and document to refine his dyad of the seeable and the sayable in his Birth of the Clinic (1963).

Unravelling the preoccupation of French avant-garde thinkers with the (French) middle ages, Holsinger speaks of a ‘premodern condition’ that lies at the base of twentieth-century critical theory, and that precedes, in many ways, the postmodern condition elucidated by Jean-François Lyotard. Holsinger's aim, in fact, is to historicise theory, which enables him to transform an idiosyncratic obsession with the middle ages among these thinkers into a mode that allows him to call into question the traditional structure of periodisation and temporality in the Western tradition as a whole.

While the paradox of the widespread influence of the middle ages on twentieth-century intellectual history, and the refusal to reflect on this heritage, has been a point of debate in literary studies, the impact of medieval art on modern art – and art history's similarly curious refusal to acknowledge this influence – has remained largely under-addressed.

Two new and exciting studies by Alexander Nagel and by Amy Powell have redressed this art-historical oversight. Each a tour de force in its own right, these books demonstrate that medieval art has formal and conceptual links with twentieth-century works, and that these links can serve as a mechanism to criticise the historical paradigm that dominates the discipline of art history. This historical framework has stipulated that a work of art belongs in the period in which it was created, that the role and meaning it obtained in the context of its production should always prevail over the significance it may have taken on in later periods.

While I was writing this essay, Hal Foster published in the London Review of Books (8 November 2012) his review of Nagel's and Powell's books under the title ‘Preposterous Timing’. Foster precisely struggles to accept that a study of medieval art (or modern art, for that matter) entails more than a reconstruction of the context of its production, as it can raise issues on strategies for seeing and showing, which gets more articulated when juxtaposed to twentieth-century art. He wrongly understands Nagel's and Powell's challenges to the exclusivity of period style as a continuation of the postmodernist critic of the author, not realising that the real problem concerns the mindset of ‘diehard modernists’ (the term is Foster's) who are too attached to their own authoritarian position to see that modern art has far-reaching links connecting it with in the past and reaching towards the future. Whereas Michael Fried and T.J. Clark have occasionally written from a contemporary perspective on early modern artists such as Caravaggio and Poussin (firmly holding on to the dominance of the author), similar projects of Nagel and Powell who as early modernists study fascinating resonances between early modern and modern art are in Foster's view ultimately ‘preposterous’. Borrowing the term from Mieke Bal's brilliant Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art: Preposterous History (1999), it is surprising that Foster evokes a model that is contradictory to the modernist narrative he holds dear. Like Reading ‘Rembrandt’: Beyond the Word–Image Opposition (1990), her polemic against the exclusively historicist approach to Rembrandt's work, Quoting Caravaggio has in many ways paved the way for books such as Nagel's and Powell's. In this book, Bal starts from the premise that the interest of contemporary artists such as Ana Mendieta, Andres Serrano, and Mona Hatoum in the Baroque ‘acts out what is in itself a Baroque vision’. These artists created art that is ‘preposterous’ – a linking of pre- and post- – as it shows how contemporary art provides a vision which re-visions the Baroque. Breaking through stylistic periodisation that makes up much of art's orthodox history, Bal proposes that we consider ‘baroque’ neither as a style nor a period, but as a perspective, a mode of thinking which emerges and re-emerges, yet not as exclusively situated in the mind of the art historian or viewer, but as articulated by art. Combining her expertise in literary theory with her proficiency in art analysis (she would not label herself an art historian, as Foster does), Bal directed the course of art history away from historical determination towards the reconsideration of such determination in terms of the art works as such.

Following Bal to this extent, Powell and Nagel each take issue with the dominance of the historical paradigm, not simply by arguing against it, but by showing how historical objects sometimes stubbornly work themselves out of chronology, out of time, to become something else: an image that prefigures, upsets, and repeats its own historical course; a vehicle through which concepts of time and history can be rethought; or an incentive to interrupt one historical account so as to create another. A marriage of past and recent forms changes the look of both of them, bridging but not overcoming the distance between them. Nagel focuses on particular, anachronistic objects that spin out of time to spill over into modernity, thereby forging new links between modernism and medievalism. Considering art works as things detached from the moments of their making, Powell is less interested in the life of anachronistic (or anachronic) objects than in their forms, which she claims are too ‘promiscuous’ to stay faithful to their origin, and, as such, blur the boundaries between old and new.

Turning away from Panofsky's belief in the task of the historian to enliven the art work by restoring the original context that produced it, and moving towards a more Warburgian mode of artistic resonance, Nagel and Powell depart from strict stylistic periodisation by refusing to accept the Renaissance – and easel painting – as the crucial joint between modernity and the middle ages. They follow in the footsteps of early-twentieth-century medievalists such as Wilhelm Worringer and Henri Focillon who, like Alois Riegl and (later) Warburg, were deeply involved with questions as to what kind of meaning a historical form may contain while travelling through time, what such forms could possibly conceptualise, and how they were able to detach themselves from any given work to find their own way when appearing in another.

Although their approaches and political and theoretical agendas differ, some of the premises of Nagel and Powell are remarkably similar, such as their reliance on the museum as an essential space for allowing objects – old and new, all cut off from their moments of origin – to forge new connections with each other through analogies, rhymes, or resonances. Whereas Nagel considers the museum to be but one episode in a larger history of site-specific art, which runs from the decorative programmes of church chapels to the conventions of gallery installation, Powell understands it to be a ‘machine for formalist looking’ that enables us to see that what art works have in common (frames, supports, pedestals) is less interesting than their differences, even as these differences invite a quest for analogies of the broadest kind. Both scholars consider their projects to be Benjaminian exercises. This is clearly the case for Powell's imaginative and thought-provoking analyses of images as instances in which the dialectics of their making and unmaking is at its most extreme, and as such provides a theory of the history of their appearance and reappearance. Medieval Modern is more of a general enterprise, offering a (sometimes dazzling) exposition of the phenomenon of medieval-obsessed art of the twentieth century.

In twenty chapters, Medieval Modern recounts a history of twentieth-century art that significantly differs from the tale we know, revealing various patterns and themes connecting medieval art with modernist art practice. Taking a new, fascinating set of comparisons as its starting point, each chapter delves more deeply into the six themes and patterns that Nagel observes as crucial. One of these patterns is ‘indexicality’: in place of Renaissance art's obsession with naturalistic representation, medieval and modern art is ‘indexical’, consisting of signs causally or metonymically linked with their referents, which hence calls for bodily involvement on the part of the viewer or image-user. Other typical themes are art's involvement with assemblage (altar pieces as well as cubist collages) and replication (Warhol's boxes and silkscreens as well as Byzantine icons). This small list closes with a reflection on conceptual art, the odd man out, it seems, as it is neither a theme nor a pattern. Here Nagel sees a resemblance between the iconoclastic criticism of early modern idolatry and conceptual art's disregard of the fetishism surrounding art works (though it remains unclear how an investigation of the former can provide insight into ‘the political and philosophical claims’ made in support of the latter).

Medieval Modern fulfils one of its major aims of opening up a different space of thinking about both medieval and contemporary art by setting up juxtapositions: for instance, comparisons between Damien Hirst's For the Love of God (2007) and a thirteenth-century reliquary bust of Saint Yrieix or Robert Smithson's series of Non-Sites and a sixth-century box with stones from various sites in the Holy Land are illuminating, revelatory and almost speak for themselves. Another delight is a discussion of strategies of installation involving a 1425 painting by Gentile da Fabriano of the tomb of St Nicolas, whose remains were removed from what is now Demre, Turkey, to the Basilica in Bari in the eleventh century. Gentile's small picture (originally part of a predella) displaying figures touching the tomb in its Bari setting, hides an ingenious surprise, as its very composition is repeated in the scene adorning the small apse in which the tomb is placed. In a brilliant analysis, Nagel shows how the subtle differences between the replication and its ‘original’ generate a temporal dimension through which a story of replacement, exposition, and reinstallation is told. Among the other highlights are the last three chapters of the book, devoted to a fascinating exploration of the meaning of the structure of the cathedral during the Weimar Republic, and in particular in the writings of the Bauhaus School.

Such a large and wide-ranging project necessarily requires some ‘crude thinking’ (as Brecht famously recommended to Benjamin) to break through established patterns of looking and received modes of interpretation. However, the downside to such blunt thinking is that some arguments seem to be too bold, for instance when the merging of frame and painting in Cimabue's celebrated Madonna and Child surrounded by Angels of 1280 is presented as an artistic invention that was purportedly ‘revived only in the concrete paintings [by Robert Ryman] of the twentieth century’, disregarding, among other instances, the tradition of – frameless – trompe l'oeil paintings that in the seventeenth century brought to perfection the fusing of image and its material support. Another example of such overreach is the pairing of L'Enseigne de Gersaint (1720), Watteau's image of a picture shop originally meant as its sign board, and Jasper Johns' Flag (1954–55). Whereas the content of each of these images is related to the art system in which it circulates, and while each purports to coincide with its referent (a flag and a shop-sign), the way that each may resettle boundaries between inside and outside needs further reflection.

A puzzling moment occurs in Chapter 3, which argues that a focus on medieval references in modernism should take preference over a broader framework that could have included, among other things, the many allusions to African art in modernism. A surprisingly conservative binary is set up between medieval and ‘non-western’ (for lack of a better term) references, in order to claim primacy for the former. Taking Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), where some of the nude figures wear African masks, as support for this medieval primacy only adds to the confusion. For instance, because André Breton once likened the Demoiselles to a Cimabue altarpiece, Nagel claims that the altarpiece as a form provided the structural – and therefore primary – organisation in Picasso's celebrated painting; the African masks, qua non-western reference, serve merely as embedded allusions, ultimately of secondary importance. Since the project of Medieval Modern as a whole is modelled upon the work of Benjamin – whose observations often originate from spatio-temporal dimensions of pictorial elements or a clash of geography and chronology – this is a disappointing move, and a missed opportunity. For surely the intertwining, for instance, of African and medieval quotations in some works, and the general interest of modernist artists in relics, ritual, and powerful objects common to both frames of reference, are valuable points of exploration that might have been further pursued here.

In a book as bold as Nagel's, one would have liked the author to have taken a radical position to explain not just the phenomenon of medievalism in modernism, but the very reason for its emergence, and why its impact has remained so dramatically understudied and undertheorised. Given the large number of American artists featured in this work, one starts wondering about the effect of the founding of The Cloisters, the branch of the Metropolitan Museum on the northern tip of Manhattan, built in the 1930s in part from Gothic fragments brought from France. While this book does not attempt to historicise theory, it could have theorised history more clearly in order to support its otherwise intriguing observations. Aiming to break down some modernist historical schemas, the book keeps its promise, however, it is not modernism and its myths that have kept the obvious medieval influences in twentieth-century art too long at bay, but the book fails to reveal that it is art history's concept of history that so easily disregards what so many art works so obviously show: that the distinctions among pre-, early, and post-modern are disciplinary fictions; that an art work always exceeds the intentions of its maker (which, by the way, Panofsky admitted) as well as its place of origin; and that twentieth-century art is not a break with everything that came before but shows a deep engagement with the history of art making. Art works testify to this relationship, yet the dominant historical paradigm upon which the discipline of art history has been built is as resistant as it is pervasive, and more often than not prevents us from seeing what some art works so clearly show.

Powell's Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum more directly takes issue with the dominant historical paradigm, and gives a sophisticated breakdown of its premises. Following Benjamin closely, she pursues a method of inquiry that inheres in the writing itself, enabling her to weave sound historical research with radical theoretical reflection in an extraordinarily lucid and wonderfully poetic way. Her project focuses on a series of deposition images from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from Northern Europe, and the role they played in clerical rites around Easter, when the death and resurrection of Christ were re-enacted. During these rites, Powell explains, wooden figures of Christ with movable arms would be taken down and entombed on Good Friday to be restored in their proper place on Easter Sunday, when Christ's resurrection was celebrated. Powell argues that deposition imagery, made at the eve of the Reformation, and depicting God's image as a limp corpse being taken down for burial, prefigures the iconoclasm to come. In addition, such images showing the prototypical image of God's human form put away as dead predict the many ‘deaths’ of art that have been declared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries after the invention of photography. To this extent she follows Joseph Koerner, who wrote that portrayals of ‘God's miserable, human death’ were in fact made both to save appearances and to ultimately reject them: ‘religious imagery has iconoclasm built into it’.¹ However, Powell's real interest lies not in the dawn and aftermath of this historical phenomenon. Rather, by declaring deposition imagery as allegories of their own suspended undoing, she focuses on tracing, through time, the very gesture of putting up and taking down an image – a to-and-fro movement of vanishing and re-emerging, death and resurrection, making and unmaking. From a vantage point firmly anchored in the twenty-first century, Powell traces back the continuous movement of suspended undoing from the most recent moment they have been ‘put up’ to hang upon the white walls of a museum, back to the origins of their making. Like Nagel, Powell sees the museum, despite its many shortcomings, as potentially fruitful, as a place where a historical object enters into new liaisons. It is this ‘promiscuity’ of form that detaches a work of art from its original context and allows it to find, in the museum space, new affinities as part of its process of re- and de-contextualisation. The only problem Powell has with the museum lies in its pretense to restore life to an object that has long been death, or more specifically, that has never lived. In a masterful rhetorical gesture Powell extends the continual oscillation between making and unmaking she detects in fifteenth-century religious art to the museum's – and art history's – desire for understanding historical excavation as a mode of resurrection. However, saving the image from historical oblivion by putting it back on a wall does not necessarily resuscitate it. A painting does not have a life, and it is for precisely that reason that it stands out of chronology, out of time. It has its course through time, but not even the unearthing of such a temporal journey can restore to an art work a life it never had. The promiscuity of form thus guarantees the art work's death, yet simultaneously it is, in its finding of new affinities, the force which pushes it through time. Remaining true to the extremism of her argument, Powell not only tells but also shows how such forms proliferate by concluding each of her chapters on historical objects – such as crucifixes with movable arms, shrouds, and Christ's wound – with a ‘vignette’ on contemporary art. The vignettes do not so much close a chapter as open up to the next one, so that the reader is introduced to a medieval object through the lens of, say, twentieth-century minimalism – a provocative rhetorical move that makes the most of her theoretical foundation. Whereas all the vignettes are wonderfully inspiring, some stand out, seeming to provide insights than are stronger than any written argument could have been. For instance, the appearance of Eva Hesse's Hang Up (1966), halfway through the book, sums up Powell's main point yet also problematises it to the extent of pushing towards new questions (is an absent image a dead image?), all the while ‘prefiguring’ the discussion of Christ's wound in the next chapter. A similar effect is achieved in the discussion of Hans Bellmer's Dolls (c. 1935), which points to fifteenth-century puppets used as workshop aids, and Robert Rauschenberg's Untitled (Self-Portrait) (1952), which inspires a discussion of Hans Holbein's Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521–22) as much as it has been inspired by it. The clash of temporalities the reader experiences when forced to look from old to new to old again breaks through the strictures of the usual double comparison (a remnant of the double slide projection as well as Heinrich Wölfflin's polarising formalism), and in addition successfully undermines the myth of a viewer's stable viewpoint as a cleavage from which to distinguish clearly the past and the future. It is this kind of visual argumentation that one always wishes for in an art-historical book, but rarely finds. In addition, this book is writing history all the while theorising it: its most daring arguments derive directly from its archival findings, and the deposition rites surrounding wooden effigies of Christ's corpse do not so much support as enable Powell's theoretical reflections. It has been said that the field of early modern studies is in need of new methodologies, and I think we have found here a long-awaited intervention. Historical research is indispensable, but there is no reason why it should not be constantly framed by more abstract thought. What Powell ultimately shows us is how an interweaving of early modern and contemporary art allows us to ‘think’ the various deaths of art, as a new way of ‘doing’ history.

When Bal's book on Caravaggio came out in 1996, it was considered a preposterous project; yet now, in hindsight, Nagel's and Powell's sophisticated analyses of medieval and modern artworks reinforce the prescience of Bal's re-vision of the past – and how much further yet we, as scholars, should attempt to reach for it in the future.

Notes