LUSH ETHICS
Anne F. Harris and
Karen Eileen Overbey
I. The Future We Want: Field
Change/Discipline Change
We want a collective
future.
This is a material
moment, and we want a material future. A lush
future, a future of exploded views and inner lives of objects, a future of
abundant encounters with the material and natural worlds, a future of touching
objects that touch us back. A collective future, a collaboration with things.
We want to call out,
through the discipline of Art History, to the field of medieval studies, and,
further, to the endeavor of the Humanities, in this material moment, when the objects of medieval studies are more
than ever in our sights. We need a field change: a change in our
field of view, our field of vision, our visual field. If we perceive
differently, we will conceive differently. Objects have hurtled through history
to get here, why keep them still now? In the flat ontology of the future we
want, objects keep moving: through juxtaposition, association, attention.
This can be our
project: articulations of objecthood; descriptions of the interconnectedness of
things. The deep and vital networks and circulations and operations. The
aesthetics of ontology.
What would that look
like? In an art history of flat ontology, for a start, a classical or
neoclassical ideal of beauty would not determine a hierarchy of objects,
styles, representations, histories. Beauty would come from being, rather than
from relativism. We could then take our time with surfaces and with substances,
teasing out and amplifying the charm, the allure, of material. In
the aesthetics of ontology all materials matter; all materials have our
attention, we can attend to all materials.
And so our aesthetics would enlarge our sense of ‘beauty’ to compass the
revelation of the workings and beings of any artwork. Any object. Oh!
For some, there may
be a fear that aesthetics is distance, that to aestheticize is to make distant,
shimmering; to hold off, to gaze at and even evaluate, and so to separate, to
distinguish ourselves from our objects. But this is perhaps a definition of
‘aesthetics’ beholden to 18th- and 19th-century philosophy, in which the arts
inhabit a special realm, set off from ‘regular’ experience, distinct especially
from the mundane, just beyond the reach of average perception; this is
aesthetics entwined with morality, and with teleology. In the future we want,
aesthetics is intimacy: beauty is close and possible and not rare; it makes us
pay attention, displace ourselves, look at manuscript, cross, cup, toaster with
possibility. This is an understanding of ‘aesthetic’ at once very medieval and
very modern: resonant with Ian Bogost’s Object
Lessons, (http://objectsobjectsobjects.com/) and also with Aquinas’s
“animated sensory pleasures (animales
delectationes),” in which we take delight in our physical and mental
interactions with objects.[1]
In medieval thought, as Mary Carruthers explains, “‘aesthetic’ meant ‘knowledge
acquired through sensory experiences’”, and while human-made artefacts did have
special status, it was more like the “ludic play space recognized by modern
anthropology and psychology” than like the distant realm of Enlightenment and
Romantic aesthetics.[2]
And so our aesthetics
inhabit this play space to engage sensation and knowledge, to pay attention to
material possibility, to be intimate with objects. But in this intimacy, this
attention, we must not occlude the alien differentness, the wonder and
strangeness of the art object. That strangeness, its
being-beyond-interpretation, is what entices us.
Here, for example [Fig. 1]: a visual field, an object.
The Lothar Cross, given by the Ottonian Emperor to the church at Aachen just
before the year 1000. This luxe crux
gemmata is 50 cm high, an oak core covered in gold and silver gilt sheets,
encrusted with 102 gems and 35 pearls, and further decorated with gold filigree
and cloisonné enamel. The Cross’s splendid workmanship, expensive materials,
and Ottonian patronage were certainly as important as its religious meaning
when it was affixed to a tall pole and carried in the public drama of
liturgical processions.[3]
At the center of the cross, where we might expect to find an image of Christ,
is a sardonyx Augustan cameo, which we could (and which we have) read in
relation to tenth-century imperial ideologies, spolia, and appropriation. More
of the stones here are reused Classical gems, perhaps chosen for their historic
or semiotic valence: an amethyst carved with the Three Graces, an onyx lion.
Now, though, in the intimate play of a materialist ontology, we propose to see
the strangeness: not the sure ideology, but the hesitation; not the power but
the plea. A jewel is rare and demanding, but it is the result of geological
imperfections; a cross affirms splendor and power, but a cross also asks for
intercession and salvation.
So we can change our
field of vision, discipline ourselves to look more materially. When we look at
the object, and not only at the image (crux
gemmata, emperor, lion, Romanitas)
we see that most stones were set to highlight their color and their size, their
lush materiality rather than their iconographic meaning; they play a visual
rhythm along the four arms of the cross. Iridescent blue teardrops at each
terminal, and at the base of each blue stone a pearl; paired green squares at
the interior angles of the cross arms; two sets of double rows of symmetrical
dots along the length, remarkably consistent in size and shape. We can start to
trace the tendrils of the filigree, to think with the object: the delicate
strands of beaded gold wire, laid curled and queued to breathe in the spaces
between the gems. The effects of movement and depth when one tendril drapes
across another. The barely-visible daubs of solder (gold, to be sure, but less
pure, with a slightly different melting point to adhere the filigree to the
plane of gold plate). The uneven edges of the bezels, tamped close around the
gems with tiny hammers, or pressed by careful fingers.
To look more
materially, at first, is to look more closely. A close looking, in pace with
the close reading of a text. To look, if not innocently, then not
all-knowingly, either. In an art history of flat ontology, we will seek the
mundane within the rare: the point where the tendril of the filigree does not
accomplish its curl, where the band around the gem is crooked, where the
gesture-to-make became tedious, where the matter is predictable. Does this
“humanize” the object? Make the gleaming gem susceptible to human faltering? Our
ontology is flat, let’s turn the table: human faltering gathers around a
gleaming gem. An art history of flat ontology doesn’t humanize the object, it
collapses the rare into the mundane, it fuses human gesture with the object’s
becoming, the human’s becoming (from emperor to museum director to viewer) with
the object’s gesture (the Lothar Cross processed thousands of time before it
was stilled by the museum). Close looking doesn’t reveal things to valorize
them: it upends them, it disintegrates the whole for its parts, oscillating
between present materiality, past gesture, future desire. At some point, in
some way we want to attend to, the Lothar Cross is equally ordinary and
extraordinary.
More closely, and
from a shifted perspective [Fig. 2],
we see that the gem settings are architectonic, miniature domed drums and
arcades, a tiny landscape evoking (perhaps) the splendor of the City of Heaven.
Reading this way, iconographically, we take the Cross’s surface in all at once;
we take its meaning. But if we linger, if we luxuriate in that very medieval
pleasure of the “multifocal perspective”, we can feel the dizzying shifts of
scale and illusion and distortion, the push and pull of “minificence and
magnificence,” the wonder of material play.[4] Here we
falter, we fall, into what Ian Bogost might call the “native logic” of the
object.[5]
We look again [Fig. 3] letting the stones and gold
lead us, both intimate and strange. We then notice that some stones are drilled
for beading, perhaps once part of Byzantine jewelry; the gems engraved with
figures of Roman gods or animals are set upside down or sideways, resisting
figural readings.[6]
The intention isn’t towards meaning, it’s towards form: that drilled pearl can
no longer be seen for the necklace it might once have been a part of, now you
see it for its luster in a new luxury, you see it in its own lushness. Symbolism-as-intention
is tricky here, too, when we know that some of these stones are post-medieval
replacements, and nineteenth-century repairs. This is an object that to some
degree resists iconography and narratology, and so resists much of art
history’s modern methods. What does it mean for art history to think about
meaning beyond a single or originary moment of creation, beyond a first, or
second, reception? As we move away from that originary point of creation,
meaning and being start to intersect in new ways. The meaning is no longer
simply what the original maker or user intended; it will be what you intend,
what you attend to. Being asserts itself over meaning: the Cross survived, the
pearl clung on, it is here and that
is the new starting point.
Materiality, as
Michael Ann Holly writes, “is that which halts transparency.”[7]
It stops us seeing through, seeing past, the object to something else, to
something beyond or besides. It keeps us focused, it slows us down and makes us
play, gives us pleasure. We will
rediscipline our eye to look more closely, more materially, to admit play and
pleasure, and to be moved in and by
the object.
So: our future is a shift in our field of vision,
in the field of play for and with objects.
II. The Boon and Bother of Lushness
The field of play of
art history has always been drawn by and to objects. You can see why.
Fantastic things whose materiality calls out. The
responses of human interlocutors have never stopped changing, framed by
liturgy, antiquarianism, connoisseurship, iconography, social history...,
always carving out a new future they want with and from the objects. Every
interpretive frame is a “future we want.” The frame is how we now present our
works of art to the future: the frame is now the means of transference,
claiming ontological status for any object as art. The frame will change
(always), but it will be there (always). The French and English Academies
reveled in the frame: Poussin prized it, Derrida pried it open.[8]
But think, now, of medieval works of art unbounded by frames, no means of
transference save accident and personal desire, only indications (no
certitudes) of meaning. They don’t exist.
And so we frame and re-frame medieval objects: with the medieval practices of
liturgy and devotion, with the rarity of antiquarianism, with the knowing eye
of connoisseurship, with the medieval texts that sustain iconography, with the
political mission of social history. The future we want is the next frame, the
frame of reference we can next share (and debate): feminism, sexuality, queer
theory, post-colonialism, eco-criticism... The frame is the object’s network:
we think we might dispense with it, get “back” to the “original” work, but any
return is itself framed. Medieval texts are presented as the surest context,
but materiality precedes and outlasts context: the gems pre-existed the cross
by millions of years, and they will persist long after the cross has come
undone. Frames (physical, digital, interpretive) are part of flat ontology -
they are flattening agents. Different
frames elicit different meanings, but let’s consider how they shift being, too. Medieval objects are not immutable, their
ontology can shift. It’s how they got here in the first place: tree to wood to
cross, mineral to suture to jewel. Let’s hold on to the frame, let’s keep
making our means of transference to the object, let’s keep the object moving,
let’s keep moving with the object.
Object oriented
ontology creates a vigorous field of play, one that makes for optimistic declarations:
one in which we can revel in the material agency of the object, in which we can
turn to our objects and see them do things. What is a hammer when it’s not
hammering? What is a cross when it’s not processing (or blessing or saving or
frightening)? What is the work of art
when it is not meaning something? It is gem pressed into gold, cameo found and
reinserted; it does light and color,
it embodies texture and rarity - it makes us want a future whose material
possibility makes us gasp. Lurking under, hovering over, is a metaphor, a
possibly dematerialized future, but for now the material holds us fast; we
fasten it to a frame and hold on.
Lushness has been the
boon and bother of art history, it is that aspect of materiality around which
the field changes; material, form, luster, texture, gleam, color, illusion --
lushness is one of the qualities we try to frame.
It is feared (think of Bernard of Clairvaux fighting the allure of image). It
is administered (think of Suger assuring himself that he was seeing through the gems). It is measured
(formalisms, iconographies, semiotics... Commandments). The Calf, lest we
forget, was golden. We try to control lush materiality, and our resulting
pleasure. The pleasure that comes from gleam and color, touch and texture. Why is pleasure so unnerving? Why does it
become an ethical dilemma? Is it because we are overwhelmed by the agency of
the object in our moments of pleasure? Because wonder might be more about the
force of the object than about our possession of it?
Bernard’s aesthetic
asceticism gives us one of the best description of the thrill of images, and
the condemnation of pleasure from lushness. The sensual seduction and harsh
sanctimoniousness of the Apology
makes even the act of reading it an ethical exercise. He lets lushness languish
in gorgeous word, sight and sound (“pulchre lucentia, canore mulcentia, suave
olentia, dulce sapientia, tactu placentia”) before calling it all shit (“ut
stercora”)[9].
What delight did Bernard take in stripping delight of its delightfulness? The
question is put not in terms of vindictiveness, but rather, precisely, in terms
of pleasure: his word play seizes on the material forms of language and makes
them dance - “deformis formositas/formosa deformitas” quoth he. He dips his quill
deep into the stuff of his words, tracing letters and shifting endings, before
he seeks to abolish the materiality altogether. He knows his stuff: in detail
and precision, he mocks color and texture and form, and he derides viewers’
helpless attraction to beauty. Then he lowers the ethical hammer: “The church
adorns her stones in gold, and abandons her naked sons.”[10] You
can feel chastened reading Bernard. Of course he’s right: bread before baubles,
food before fantasy. But who is he to tell anyone that their pleasure at beauty
is empty? Who are we to do so? Or not do so? Thus, the dilemma.
But even Bernard
can’t stay in it too long, even Bernard needs resolution, frames: “Assentio,”
he says in response to Psalm 26:8’s declaration “Lord, I have loved the beauty
of your house.” He agrees that churches should be adorned, because the good
that material opulence might do for the “simple and devout” outweighs the power
it gives the “vain and avaricious.” Appeal, pertinence, usefulness - those are
Bernard’s frames for lushness and they are still very much in use today to
curtail or justify the beauty of materiality. You can be sympathetic to
Bernard: he was overwrought at the lushness of wrought things because he
understood their allure and agency. You can be aggravated with him: his
attempts to strip lushness of its place in spirituality results in a
moralization of beauty and form that creates hierarchies (monastic elites and
devout simpletons) and divides. For us -- for the future we want -- these can
be breached by the aesthetics of flat ontology.
Because the material
will out: the wonder of Augustus’s lush cameo freaks out the center of the
Lothar cross. In the future we want, lushness is vibrant: it unnerves us with
pleasure, it blurs the boundary of discipline and desire, it acts on us. We want this play, this
field of riotous blooming, this fertility. We want to stay longer in the
conundrum of lushness: its ability to nurture but not to feed, how it moves us
in its stillness. We want to consider Jane Bennett’s “shift from epistemology
to ontology.”[11]
The future we want is on a material trajectory of perpetual becoming, how
objects come to be, how they are at any given time, and we with them.
III. Struggles at hand. The ethical
project of art history
This is a way of
engaging a long history of (as Maura Nolan has recently written) sensation and
asethetics, from Augustine and Aquinas to Adorno and Elkins.[12]
And in this project, texts should not be our only primary sources. Objects
themselves, and art objects especially, in their very made-ness, their facture, in their uneasy difference from the
natural world (even if that difference is only the frame, the setting of a
pearl into a hammered gold bezel), disclose the depth and the varieties of
human-object networks and assemblages.
In all this close
looking, this luxuriating in lushness, this pleasure, beauty, and ekphrasis, we
find ourselves taking up some rather old-fashioned art historical methods. And
we find ourselves sympathetic to the demands of formalists and connoisseurs
that we see artwork for itself. It’s easy to see the affinity here: the artist
and art critic Roger Fry (1866-1934), for example, championed the autonomy of
the visual ecounter with art, apart from literary and historical knowledge, and
described the specific formal elements of artworks -- especially “plasticity” -- that grip the viewer and provoke the
aesthetic experience.[13] Giovanni Morelli (1816-1891), Bernard
Berenson (1865-1959), and other connoisseurs wrote lovingly and persuasively of
specific details of paintings and sculptures. Bernson even described the
aesthetic experience as a loss of boundary between viewer and object:
In
visual art the aesthetic moment is that fleeting instant, so brief as to be
almost timeless, when the spectator is at one with the work of art he is
looking at.... He ceases to be his ordinary self, and the picture or building,
statue, landscape, or aesthetic actuality is no longer outside himself. The two
become one entity; time and space are abolished and the spectator is possessed
by one awareness.[14]
And for Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), art was
a visual language, a distinct mode of knowledge: the agency of the work itself
acted through formal and stylistic means.
Such possibility, in
these ideas, for our materialist project, for the future we want! But we are
uncomfortable, too, with this legacy. Because connoisseurship and
nineteenth-century formalism wrought command
of objects, and teleologies of style and masters. Because aesthetics was most
often transhistorical and absolute.
Uncomfortable because our opening to objectness and materiality and
lushness seems also to reopen an old disciplinary wound, the tension between
aesthetics and structuralism.[15]
And so this future
that we want troubles us, and in realizing it we must attend to this tension:
do we have to give up the care for the liberal democratic subject nurtured by
the hermeneutic projects of
iconography, feminism, marxism, and postcolonialism? Over the last forty or so
years, by exploring how we know objects, by exploring their meaning, function,
and use-value to patrons, makers, and beholders, art history described the
workings of power and the inequities of representation. This has given us a
political and ethical project in art history, one that we value, inhabit, and
want to defend.
Can our lush
object-oriented future be an ethical
one, too?
To think about the ethics of beauty and
materiality we can look not only to Bennett and Bogost and Harman and Latour,
but also to our medieval objects-in-themselves, which had their own ethical
power and moral presence. Medieval beholders knew, as we do, the power of
art-objects to elevate the human spirit. So much of the medieval encounter with
things was revelatory. Abbot Suger
knew it when he wrote of the transformative power of precious stones:
Thus, when -- out of my delight in the
beauty of the house of God -- the loveliness of the many-colored gems has
called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to
reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on
the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself
dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither
exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven;
and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that
higher world in an anagogical manner. [De
Administatione, XXXIII]
The mystics --
Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, Mechthild and Hadewijch and Margery Kempe -- knew,
too, that looking at objects (and touching them, stroking them, losing yourself
to them) could save your soul. And all kinds of devout beholders kissed
manuscripts, fondled statues, tucked tiny relics into their clothing and
jewelry to keep them close, intimate. Medieval devotional objects, as Caroline
Walker Bynum reminds us, are not merely symbols, indexes, or icons, but the
immediate presence of the holy.[17]
That presence was in relics, of course, but it was also palpable in things like
gemstones, which were formed through mysterious cosmic processes, and often had
celestial origins. Objects like the jewelled Lothar Cross were efficacious and
miraculous because of their
materiality, not despite it, and the encounter with them depended on the sensory
experience. Medieval objects -- at least, these devotional objects -- were not
simply instrumentalized by medieval beholders, but were understood as
essentially embedded in networks, in assemblages, of icon, human, divine,
nature, and material.
Yet we cannot account
only for the religious objects and the devotional networks. If we are to take
seriously an aesthetics of ontology, we can’t limit our vision (or our
pleasure) to religious objects any more than to a canon of “masterworks.” If
“beauty” is loosened from some of its Kantian disinterest -- which tends to
separate “art” from artefact and “beautiful” from utilitarian[18]
-- then we can grapple with a problem we love: what is beautiful about medieval
objects beside/beyond/outside their religious import? Sure: some of their
particular materiality tugs at modern/postmodern notional beauty and visual
pleasure. But there is also the beauty of survival.
The impossibility of medieval objects, for us: the fascination of their very
present ontology. The Beowulf manuscript in the fire, the Stafforshire Hoard
underground, the Ghent altarpiece in a salt mine. That survival doesn’t have to
be unique: the Saxo-Norman crucible [Fig.
4], the clay lamp, the cooking pot. The mundane survives, too. How to
attend to these objects? We can think
of thirsty throats, cold fingers, and hungry mouths - we can see the beauty in
that survival, in the persistence of presence, long after usefulness is gone
and purpose is moot.[19]
The aesthetics of
ontology begin with materiality: we can attend
to the material at hand. We can
marvel at the emergence, manipulation, and survival of the clay. We can think
about use, but in the stillness of a the museum, presence prevails. The
aesthetics of flat ontology see the lushness of the clay cup. Of course, flat
does not mean equal: we are not seeking to valorize clay to claim it as gold.
We are asking for attention, for a
future that attends to the power of the material, whether it be clay or
gold. If the fundamental tenet of
identity politics, of the political project of historicism, is visibility, can we turn that to making
objects -- of all sorts -- visible? Can we value that, alongside the recovery
of the muted voices of female embroiderers, alongside the exposure of violence
in racial or class representation? Can the aesthetic act of description be an
ethical practice?
Because -- oh! -- that is the future we want: an ethical relationship with objects
that still allows for lushness.
IV. Struggles await. Identity Politics
Oh! That is the future we want: an ethical
relationship with objects that still allows for lushness.
And so we ask what to
do with lushness and its attendant decadence? The problem with lushness is
that, usually, someone owns the lush object and wields its power. But might our pleasure dislodge unique ownership?
Is there an element of pleasure that takes
possession of the object of pleasure? Do we mock Protestantism and
Puritanism and their mistrust of the material world? Easy. Harder to mock Marx
and class consciousness. Harder to make it “all right” to prioritize the
lushness of the Lothar Cross when there’s a starving pilgrim nearby. So let’s
not. People have their own materiality, which can be strategized as identity
politics. We have to confront the anxiety about object oriented ontology and
post-humanism and eco-criticism displacing/replacing human subjects. But it’s
the belief that we are autonomous subjects wielding dependent objects that we
want to break down. We’re going to have
to let our guard down as we move towards the collective future we want. We’re
going to have let ourselves, and everybody else, feel pleasure, feel the power
of pleasure. Moments of enjoyment can become moments of resistance to singular
ownership and hierarchy.
Bogost points out
that we’ve worked hard for a long time to articulate an ethical relationship to
each other, and lately to animals and the environment.[20] But,
as surrounded with things as we are, as encased in objects as we’ve become, we
have just begun to articulate, and maybe formulate,
an ethical relationship with objects. We want to be provoked to articulate an
ethical approach to things. To experience how actants (be they cross, gold,
Lothar, pilgrim, or the memory of Augustus as a really great emperor) are the
builders of the collective reality. Can
you fight social injustice by loving the Lothar Cross? You can’t do it through the Cross as an object; you have to give up on yourself as
the wielder of stuff to make things right. But remember, start to see: the
pilgrim does her own looking and savoring outside of what you think is right.
Each viewer is an actant in the ever-shifting experience of lushness guided by
material, sense, perception, and response. These precepts of the aesthetics of
ontology precede, and perpetually recede from, the concerns of epistemology.
They will not attend to iconography, liturgy, or symbolism. They will group
around the pilgrim, feel her tiredness and warmth, her thirst and relief, the
dryness of her hands as her fingers reach for the cool touch of the cross or
the crucible. Gather with her in
wonder. We, the art historians, the gathered here today, are the latest actants
in the trajectory of this Cross, we hurtle forth with it for a little while,
building collectives along the way - that’s the future we want.
***
Ultimately, our call
for the future (of our field, our discipline, our humanities endeavor) is not
simply for a return to “materiality,” or a “new” materialism, in relation to
specific representations or objects. It is rather a call to treat the objects of medieval studies (the
artworks, the texts, the artefacts, the histories, the people) with compassion.
To see them in their native logics,
their strangeness, their ontological beauty. Materiality is not a trend or a
fashion or a mode; it is an ethical
system, and it should inform our collective future. That’s the future we want.
Figure Captions:
Figure 1: The Lothar
Cross, jeweled side (“Front”), c. 1000, gold, gilt silver and gems over a wood
core, 49.8 cm x 38.8 cm x 2.3 cm. Cathedral Treasury, Aachen, photo by Ann
Münchnow, photo ©: Domkapitel Aachen.
Figure 2: The Lothar Cross, oblique view of jewels and
filigree. Cathdral Treasury, Aachen, photo ©: Domkapitel Aachen.
Figure 3: The Lothar
Cross, detail view of jewels and filigree. Cathdral Treasury, Aachen, photo ©:
Domkapitel Aachen.
Figure 4: Saxo-Norman
Crucible, mid 11th-mid 12th
century, ceramic; earthenware, H 78 mm; DM (rim) 103 mm. Museum of
London #13175.
[1] Aquinas’s discussion of these “animated pleasures” appears
in his commentary on Aristotle’s Nichomachean
Ethics, in Sententia Ethicae 3;
see Mary Carruthers, The Experience of
Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 71.
[3] For excellent recent work on the Cross, see Eliza Garrison,
Ottonian Imperial Art and Portraiture:
The Artistic Patronage of Otto III and Henry II (Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2012).
[4] On “minificence and magnificence”, and the pleasures of
puzzlement in medieval artefacts (both text and image), see Carruthers 151-155,
172-175, and 187-193.
[5] Ian Bogost, Alien
Phenomenology; or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2012)
[6] A recent study of these and other “misplaced” engraved
stones is Genevra Kornbluth, “Roman Intaglios Oddly Set: the Transformative
Power of the Metalwork Mount,” in “Gems
of Heaven’: Recent Research on Engraved Gemstones in Late Antiquity, c. AD
200-600,” ed. Chris Entwistle and Noël Adams, British Museum Research
Publication 177 (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 2011): 248-256.
[7] Michael Ann Holly, in “Notes From the Field: Materiality,” Art Bulletin 95 (2013): 10-37 (16).
[8] Paul Duro, The
Academy and the Limits of Painting in Seventeenth-Century France
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Duro discusses Poussin’s letter
to his friend Chantelou, in which the artist champions the use of the frame, on
pp. 180ff. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in
Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of
Chicago, 1987), especially “The Parergon,” 37-82.
[9] http://www.binetti.ru/bernardus/14.shtml
“we [monks like Bernard who] deem things that gleam with beauty, soothe
with sound, please with smell, temper with sweetness, lighten with touch, as
shit.” [A.H. translation]
[10] “Suos lapides induit auro, et suos filios nudos deserit.”
[11] Jane Bennett, Vibrant
Matter; a Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press,
2010), 3.
[12] Maura Nolan, “Medieval Sensation and Modern Aesthetics:
Aquinas, Adorno, Chaucer,” Minnesota
Review 80 (2013): 145-158.
[13] See Roger Fry, Transformations:
Critical and Speculative Essays on Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926),
especially Chapter 1, “Some Questions in Esthetics” (1-44).
[14] Bernard Berenson, Aesthetics
and History (London: Constable, 1950), quoted in Michael Ann Holly, “The
Melancholy Art,” Art Bulletin 89/1
(2007): 7-17 (7).
[15] For a recent explorations of this divide, see Francis
Halsall, “Making and matching: aesthetic judgement and art historical
knowledge,” Journal of Art Historiography
7 (2012): 1-17. The gap between personal, “subjective” writing about art and
“traditional” art historical scholarship is perhaps nowhere more apparent than
in T.J. Clark’s lovely book, The Sight of
Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2006), a meditation on his relationship with two paintings by Poussin.
[17] See Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe
(New York: Zone Books, 2011), 101-121.
[18] A good discussion of this is Ivan Gaskell, “Beauty,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed.
Robert S. Nelson and Richard Schiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003), 267-280.
