Medieval Art Historical Imagination

This study analyzes what fifteenth century pilgrims from Northern Europe wrote about the art and architecture they encountered while on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  Although these pilgrims did not have the discipline of art history, they nonetheless had a strong art historical imagination that conditioned their reception of old art and architecture.  Their attempts at dating objects demonstrate a pre-modern periodization in which important rulers or dynasties matter most, and the terms medieval and Renaissance are unknown.  They expected striking objects to have significant histories, studied those objects appearance for clues to those histories, and read a city’s buildings as a trustworthy barometer of its vitality.  Lacking our hierarchy of fine and applied arts, they were open to appreciate a wide range of objects, which they frequently praise in terms of their workmanship.

The inventory of the monastery of St-Denis’s treasury evaluates more than three hundred objects, from classical cameos to sixteenth-century metalwork. The inventory was the product of collaboration between court secretaries, Parisian goldsmiths, and monastic administrators. Deploying their specialized expertise, the goldsmiths identified the materials and techniques used in the objects, while the monks presented their identity and history. Careful comparative scrutiny allowed the group to document losses, revealing the treasury’s fragility, and to recognize the complex fabrication history of composite objects, like the martyrs’ shrine. The same comparative scrutiny undergirded the provenances contemporaries invented for several works in the treasury.

A passage from the Grandes Chroniques de France claims that the rebuilding of the nave of Saint-Denis in the 1230s marked the first new construction there since Dagobert built the church in the seventh century. The text’s omission of Abbot Suger’s famous campaigns in the 1130s and 1140s, which the abbot himself did so much to commemorate, provides an opportunity to assess Suger’s reception, to see if and how his hope to be remembered was realized in the centuries after his death. Reviewing the evidence from Saint-Denis’ chronicles and inventories, we find that the years around 1300 marked a turning point in Suger’s posthumous reputation. Some of this is probably the inevitable result of the passage of time, as the living memory of Suger died; it also results from the desire to celebrate the ambitious construction at the abbey in the thirteenth century. The article concludes by comparing the memory of Suger with that of other celebrated patrons, including Bernward of Hildesheim, Louis IX, and Anquetil of Moissac.

Despite the wealth of material and textual evidence attesting to the practice of Christian pilgrimage throughout history, comprehending an individual's understanding of pilgrimage in relation to his or her own identity has always proved challenging. Pilgrimage studies scholars have tended to look to travel accounts, chronicles, and collected pilgrim souvenirs to discern how pilgrims were affected by and responded to their experiences. One form of source material that has gone largely underexamined in this regard is the genre of portraiture. This article explores how and why the concept of pilgrimage could be incorporated into the self-fashioned images of patrons in medieval and early modern Europe. Building on foundational but geographically and temporally specific studies of Jerusalem confraternity portraits, it aims to consider both overt and subtle iconographic references to pilgrimage to broaden our understanding of what constitutes a pilgrim portrait. By engaging with the flexibility of pilgrimage iconography and the multifaceted motivations behind invoking it in a permanent likeness, this paper argues for the dual faculties of memory and imagination present in portraits that manifest allusions to an individual's pilgrim identity. Furthermore, it paves the way for future studies of pilgrimage iconography generally, and specifically of pilgrim portraits in a more abstract, allegorical sense.

This article addresses medieval texts that comment on the loss or revival of artistic media.  Mostly written by ecclesiastical authors, these texts offer evidence of how medieval viewers understood objects and techniques in historical context.  They demonstrate the medieval people used media to periodize past art historic production, unlike ancient or Renaissance authors who prioritized the rise or fall of representational skills.  This periodization is linked to local or institutional history.