Openings

Happy Election Night! I hope everyone got out and voted today, and if Facebook statuses are any indication, it seems that people my age aren’t as apathetic as we are stereotyped to be. But that’s not what I’m here to ponder this lovely night.

I’m taking the History of Western Art with Dr. McColl this semester, and about a month ago, the Art, German Studies, and Gender Studies departments sponsored a lecture given by Dr. Jeffrey Hamburger, a medieval art historian at Harvard University, on text and image in medieval religious books. Dr. Hamburger was one of Dr. McColl’s professors in graduate school, so Dr. McColl required our class to go (not that I wouldn’t have gone anyway, the medievalist that I am). In this talk, Dr. Hamburger stressed the symbolic and practical importance of the codex form and the new possibilities that the act of opening a codex created. For medieval Christians, the open book represented salvation, illustrated in the Lamb’s ability to break the seven seals in chapter five of the book of Revelation. I found the manuscript images of this scene interesting in that they depicted the book as a codex, as the modern Biblical translations with which I am familiar describe this object as either a book in general or a scroll. This is an important distinction, as scrolls were used in medieval art to represent the Old Testament Law and prophets, while codices represented Christ, and the new covenant. The codex appeared in the fourth century AD, but it was this symbolic value to Christians that accelerated its adoption. Dr. Hamburger also pointed out the practical considerations that popularized the production of codices: they were more convenient and more comprehensive than scrolls and allowed scribes and patrons to add images to texts and to exploit facing pages to show two images that complimented or juxtaposed one another. While scrolls were still used for public documents and oral readings, codices came to be associated with silent reading and with a transition from an aural culture to a visual culture in which seeing was more important than hearing. Dr. Hamburger chose a variety of images from many different times and places during the Middle Ages to illustrate the various purposes of images in books and the different techniques artists used to achieve their desired effect., which demonstrated the breadth of his analysis.

At that point in the semester, we hadn’t moved past Hellenistic and Greek art in class, but Dr. Hamburger’s presentation touched on several concepts that we had already discussed. In some of the works we examined, such as Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos, we considered the role of the viewer in the meaning of the image; in this case, the pose of Aphrodite implies that the viewer interrupted her bath. The relationship between the viewer and the image was also an important element in understanding medieval images such as those in a certain Carolingian gospel book that bring the reader into the world of the four evangelists as they composed their gospels. We also looked at the interaction between text and image in works such as the Palette of Narmer and the Stele of Hammurabi, and this interaction was much more developed in medieval books, as images communicated ideas contained in texts or created new meanings for images by associating them with certain texts, as was the case with the images of Jesus and Mary surrounded by verses from the Song of Solomon. In ancient art, we looked at various representations of the relationship between humans and deities, and this tradition continues in the medieval images we saw during Dr. Hamburger’s presentation. Some prayer books showed different images of the ruler humbling himself before Christ, while others, such as one image of an emperor and the Virgin Mary, give humans the same status as important religious figures in a way that is very similar to images such as the Stele of Hammurabi. The media, iconography, and function of these medieval images are very different from the ancient and classical works that we discussed in class, but the presence of these themes illustrates that there are elements of continuity that transcend time and space and to connect people and the images they create.

Not only was this a really fascinating talk, but Dr. Hamburger has a great sense of humor, which he showed throughout his talk. He passed around a wax tablet and stylus to show everyone what one medieval writing tool was like, and he used now obsolete printer paper and a stapler to illustrate differences between scrolls and codices. We also learned the complete history of the bookmark: it was an important readers’ tool in breviaries and other books that frequently made use of cross-referencing. They were also important to copyists who needed to mark their places as they worked through manuscripts. After the talk, the audience asked some excellent questions, and Dr. McColl said in class that Dr. Hamburger was very impressed with the audience and the students who asked questions—apparently that doesn’t happen often in the Ivy League.

It’s been a really good semester for lectures, as there have been a lot of really interesting speakers. Brenna went to a history lecture last week about swearing, and there’s a talk next week about Jewish roots in Germany and the week after on the Whiskey Rebellion. I’m glad that there have been a variety of speakers and that I’ve been able to go; when I first came to college, I went to a lot of lectures my first semester and I thought they were each great opportunities for students. In the past couple of years, there haven’t seemed to be as many and my schedule has made it more difficult for me to go, but I’m hoping that I’ll still be able to catch lectures like these wherever I end up after graduation.