“Declarative Materiality: Inscription and
Artistic Process in Medieval Art”
(I would now subtitle it: "Making and Becoming in Medieval Art")
"Letters are shapes indicating
voices. Hence they represent things
which they bring to mind through the windows of the eyes. Frequently they speak
voicelessly the utterances of the absent." When John of Salisbury made
this declaration in his Metalogicon
from 1159, he engaged the multiplicity of voices and identities involved in the
experience of writing in the Middle Ages. By no means confined to the
manuscript page, medieval letters projected the voices of authors, scribes, artists,
patrons, supplicants, saints, and God himself from an array of surfaces
including metal, stone, wood, ivory, and even gems. This dynamic of voice and
materiality exemplifies what Jeffrey Hamburger, in his book Script as Image, has called "the
plenitude packed into medieval representations of letters," (57).
In many instances, inscriptions on
works of art spoke to the artistic process itself. For our work together, I
have chosen two inscriptions from the High Middle Ages, one of an intimate the
other of a communal scale, that are variants on a phrase of making: AELFRED MEC
HEHT GEWYRCAN ("Alfred had me made") and GISLEBERTUS HOC FECIT
("Gislebertus made this"). These inscriptions will hold our attention
because of the particular placement of the inscriptions upon the work of
art, and what it might reveal to us about the act of making by the
artist, and about the event of becoming for the image.
Both inscriptions occur at crucial transitional spaces of
the art object: wrought in gold as its frame, or carved in limestone to frame
two distinct spaces. Knowledge of gold-smithing, and sculpture are re-marked
upon by the presence of the inscriptions, and consequently draw attention to
the material process and boundary of the image. In occupying these
liminal sites, the inscriptions, I will argue, collapse a series of binaries we
have come to expect in art history, between subject and object, representation
and presence, animate and inanimate, human and non-human, and material and
discursive. The result, I believe, is a call for us to reconsider how being
attentive to the making of images can provoke a welcome entanglement between
artist, audience, and art. In seeking these moments of "entanglement"
provoked by inscriptions, I am inspired by the language and ideas of the material
ecocriticism of Serenella Iovino and Serpil Opperman, whose call for a
materially shared existence presents a productive way to keep the making
of art part of its perpetually emergent becoming – an art historical
mode to which I will return in my conclusion.
THE
ALFRED JEWEL
 |
| The Alfred Jewel, betw. 871-899 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford |
During his reign from 871 to 899, King
Alfred the Great of Wessex made a series of gifts to all the bishops in his
realm to invigorate, some have said to instill, readership in his leading
clergy. Accompanying King Alfred's own Old English translation of Pope Gregory
the Great's Cura pastoralis (On pastoral care), each bishop received
an aestel, a "little spear"
from the Latin hastula – a pointer
for reading. Designed to be both cradled in the hand, as well as slid along the
surface of the manuscript page, this pointer guided the reader across the
letters of sanctified writing and amplified the sacrality and authority of the
text. This remarkable aestel is now
known as the Alfred Jewel both for its material splendor and for its
inscription reading AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN ("Alfred had me made").
The letters are both binding and boundary
to a rock crystal from Roman antiquity re-carved to cover an enameled figure,
long thought to be Saint Cuthbert, but now, through iconographic corroboration,
more usually identified as the allegory of Sight. The wide eyes of the figure
of Sight are amplified by those of a dragon whose mouth would have held the
ivory, bone, or wood pointer that tracked the reading.
To hold the Alfred Jewel is to join hands
with a master goldsmith working in 20k gold, a high level of purity of the
material that indicates its import, most likely from the Middle East, Spain, or
southern France. Anchoring his hold on the dragon's head with his fingers, and
feeling the rock crystal hub of the aestel
press against his palm, our bishop reader would have felt the aestel 's insistent, and wondrously
transformative materiality, even as it guided his spiritual reading. The soft
bumps of the meticulous filigree that ropes around both the bottom and the top
of the inscription are reconfigured to become the texture of the dragon's skin in
the filigreed surface of its head animated by the reader's gestures dragging
the aestel across the manuscript page.
The aestel is a "moving"
work of art in all sense of the word: it is seldom still, perpetually engaged
in the emergence of its own letters and forms, of the text beneath its pointer,
and of its owner as reader.
The letters of the aestel themselves are not only molded in a proportionate harmony
that stretches all the way around the rock crystal, they are also marked with
interior lines to accentuate their volume and fullness, materializing their
words in resonance with the materialization of the words enabled by the
medieval practice of reading which called for enunciation out loud, in contrast
to our silent reading today. Citing the notable difficulty and expertise of the
craftsmanship, Ben Tilghman has suggested that the inscription be translated
not only as "Alfred had me made" but rather as "Alfed had me worked" which aligns even more
closely with the old English wyrcean
(to work). The painstaking work of the aestel
may be not just a sign of luxury, but also one of labor, and the legible, tangible
traces of the artist's hand (in the expert work of filigree, re-carving,
setting, sculpting, and inscribing) project an expertise and a labor of making.
When considering only the static object stilled by a museum display, it is the aestel itself that speaks most
immediately: "Alfred had me, the aestel,
worked." But when the object emerges into its function as a pointer for
the reading of valuable text, the experiences and identities of the artist and
the reader are brought into play, and we can start to consider how the artist
was "worked" or "made" by such an important commission; as
well as how the bishop is being "worked" or "made" into the
reader King Alfred desires (nay, ordains) him to be. The knowledge of the aestel, in its intimacy with the text,
the knowledge of the artist, in his intimacy with the materials, and the
knowledge of the reader, in learning the content of the sacred text become
interdependent. Making is entangled with becoming; labor, effort, and expertise
materialize as endeavors shared by the aestel,
the artist, and the reader.
Fluid ontologies, in which one thing
becomes another energize the poems that have come to be known as
"Anglo-Saxon riddles." Written down around the year 1000, but in
existence through oral tradition for generations before then, the riddles begin
with one state of being of a material and traces it through its manipulations
and manufactures as it becomes another entity entirely. Thus, Riddle 24 begins
in the voice of the animal whose hide is used to make a manuscript and ends in
the voice of the holy book that will save a man's soul. Throughout the poem,
the "I" is constant, even though the identity is fluid. So, too, I am
suggesting, the "me" of the Alfred Jewel fluctuates in identities,
even as it remains the same making a distinction between subject and object (between
artist, aestel, and audience) moot.
The effort of the aestel in being made, that of the artist in making, and that of the
reader in becoming are entangled around the object so that, while here I can
hold them apart through analysis, in the act and gestures of reading, making
and becoming become enmeshed for all three. By picking up the aestel, the reader becomes a part of a
community of readers, authorized by the king, sanctified by precious materials,
and sealed by knowledge.THE TYMPANUM OF AUTUN
The tympanum of Autun cathedral was
sculpted in limestone in the 1120s and 30s. Depicting a Last Judgment with a
Heaven and Hell frenetic enough to provoke the cathedral's canons to plaster
the entire surface over in the 18th-century, the material presence
of bodies writhing in apocalyptic agony was too insistent even 600 years after
their sculpting. Autun's tympanum continues to stir passions and provoke
controversies,
few more passionate and controversial
than what and whom are meant by the inscription GISLEBERTUS HOC FECIT ("Gislebertus made
this") which succinctly wedged itself amidst the words of Christ at the
Last Judgment. The 1999
publication of Legends in Limestone by
Linda Seidel questioned, and some will say over-turned, the heroic narrative
that a single artist is signified by the phrase, a narrative which had had
traction since it was first suggested by George Zarnecki and Denis Grivot in
1960. Wresting "Gislebertus hoc fecit" from the status of a signature
to that of an inscription, Seidel's research argued for the phrase carved into
the tympanum as a "stone charter" within what she calls a
"material narrative" – a heavily material inscription meant to evoke
the name of the last Carolingian duke of the late 10th century in a
region still tumultuously ruled by the Capetians in the 12th-century
of the cathedral's construction. Medieval art historians have been grudging
about giving up the unified identity of the "medieval Michaelangelo"
as Gislebertus-as-artist had been dubbed. Gislebertus-as-ancestor is a much
more fragmented identity, as Seidel's argument positions it, diffused across
memory and history. But even, or I would say especially, as an
inscription signaling a donor rather than an artist, "Gislebertus hoc
fecit" speaks to the effort of making as it elides with that of becoming
in the after-life.
As with the Alfred Jewel, though on a
radically different scale, we stand before a work of art that announces the
effort of its making. The figures of Autun cathedral still sway and stretch
with detailed and unusual torment. There is writhing even in Heaven, as
resurrecting souls cling to angels' wings in escaping the call of a trumpet of
the Last Judgment, and seize the hands of St. Peter in a final plea. A
particularly burdened angel is embraced around the hips by a desperate soul
while hoisting another wriggling soul's insistently heavy "body" into
the architecture of Heaven above.
One of the most poignant scenes in Hell
performs the sculptural and acrobatic feat of positioning a figure on the
supports of the Scales of Judgment, as he calls out (oh to hear those words!)
to the Heavenly side, leaning against the scale, willing and weighing the
scales to lean in St. Michael's favor against the grappling demons. In these scenarios
of reaching and striving, the making and carving of the limestone
sculpture is insistent in the weight and effort of the figures. Angels' wings
are thick with stone; hopeful souls are heavy as rock; saints' robes stretch up
in slabs. Once again, the effort of the artist is amplified, and identities
become fluid, not by and with a reader this time, but through the yearning
figures on display for a viewer hopeful or even fervent for salvation. The
figures of Autun exist in the dynamic tension between the transcendence of
reaching for Heaven and a world weighed down by pathos.
The stone inscriptions
speaking the words of Christ in this heavy Heaven take on a significant role as
the only element containing the emerging masses of resurrecting souls from
their heavenly or hellish destinations. Christ is framed by his own words on
the mandorla that encircles him: "I alone dispose of all things and crown
the just, those who follow crime I judge and punish."
"Thus shall rise again everyone who
does not lead an impious life and endless light of day shall shine for
him" reads the inscription separating Heaven from the resurrection.
"Here let fear strike those whom earthly
error binds. For their fate is shown by the horror of these figures"
stretches out beneath Hell, at one point punctured by the grasping claws of a
devil snatching a soul even before its judgment at the scales. These words
become material in their enunciation, for as they are traced with the eye or
read aloud by a voice, the internal rhymes of the disyllabic leonine hexameters
of the inscriptions emerge.
·
Omnia
dispono solus meritoque corono
·
Quose
scelus exercet me iudice pena coercet
·
Quiseque
resurget ita quem non trahit impia vita
·
Et
lucebit ei sine fine lucerne diei
·
Terreat
hic terror quos terreus alligat error
·
Nam
fore sic verum notat hic horror specierum
As the visual space is
crowded with figures, so the words around the tympanum are made thick with
rhyme. In the midst of this structured, rhyming language emerges
"Gislebertus hoc fecit" as a disruptive presence – neither rhyming,
nor coupled, unattached, a signifier floating more than ever since Linda Seidel
unmoored it from the heroic narrative of the solitary artist. Who speaks these
words? Would Christ interrupt Himself in thundering his leonine rhyme? The time
and place of the speaking remains open-ended, blurring distinctions of the
here-and-now and the hereafter, stretching across past time and future time,
sustaining multiple states of being. The Gislebertus inscription bridges words
and worlds, collapsing human and divine time and space, and offering immediacy
through the knowledge and insistence of its own heavy making.
CONCLUSION
These two brief excurses
around inscriptions that speak (to) the making of their objects seek to expand our
understanding of the artistic process in medieval art, not just in the act of
creation, but in the lasting fascination with making and becoming.
Inscriptions keep works of art "in progress" – they keep the act of
making current and perpetual through their evocations of what I have called "fluid
ontologies," those identities and states of becoming (of artist, audience,
and art object) that gather around matter as it coalesces into event. In
articulating the ideas of "material ecocriticism," Serenella Iovino
and Serpil Opperman look to matter as a site of entanglement between what has
been kept separate as the human and the non-human (building on the work of
ecocriticism that seeks to undo the damaging binary of nature and culture). The
gold, enamel, rock crystal, and limestone we have been discussing this morning constitute
what Iovino and Opperman call "storied matter" – an "interchange
of organic and inorganic matter, the continuity of human and nonhuman forces,
and the interplay of bodily natures, all forming active composites." (Material Ecocriticism, 21). When, in the
solitude of his study, the bishop picks up his golden, enameled aestel encased in rock crystal and feels
the edges of the letters of its inscription in his palm, he engages the king's
favor, his own religious knowledge, and an intimacy with materials that join in
the concerted effort of making him (into) a reader. When, in the narrow,
crowded viewing space of the tympanum of Autun, the pilgrim looks up to the
bodies of souls yearning within stone and hears the inscriptions read aloud to
the community around her, she becomes entangled in the time and place of the
here-and-now and the hereafter, her own knowledge of Heaven and Hell made vivid
by weighty stone, and the potentiality of her being in salvation. "Storied
matter," here as highlighted by inscriptions but with a multiplicity of
possible applications to works of art, has great potential for art history in
the Material Turn, as the field opens up the concept of making to include the "shared
becoming" of artist, audience, and art.
