The Head of a (French?) King Revisited

In looking back at my object of beauty post with a critical eye, I immediately thought that my comparison between the fragmented head of a French king and medieval poetry was a bit contrived. There seemed to be too many differences between the sculpture and the poetry I had learned about in class to justify using this object to represent the world of the poet. Yet, as I thought further about these “flaws” in my reasoning, I began to realize that the sculpture’s connection to poetry truly is a natural one. In fact, as I attempted to reconcile these differences, I stumbled upon one overarching similarity: both the sculptor and the medieval poet were simultaneously confined and free in their work. I leave this statement intentionally vague, as I wish to return to it at the end of this blog post when it will have greater meaning.

The first glaring difference that I observed between my object of beauty and poetry is that poetry, in the Middle Ages, had a largely oral and performative tradition. Moreover, poetry and music were often passed on orally, as Alexander Lingas notes regarding Byzantine music (and in particular Byzantine melodies). How can we reconcile this with a static object to be viewed, not heard? I believe the connection lies in the fact that oral performance, of necessity, involves multiple people interacting at the same time with the given art form. This joint experience is mirrored in my object. The larger-than-life head was part of a series of statues on the west façade of the important church of Saint-Denis, so it was highly visible to the public. Thus, it lent itself to communal observation and, furthermore, to public engagement if we consider its role as part of the church’s portals. This partially addresses the issue of transmission as well; perhaps, due to the statues’ prominent display, nearby residents and travelers spread the word of the church’s façade. Were I to research this object further, I would certainly be curious as to this matter: how far did tales of the exterior of Saint-Denis travel, if at all, and how accurate were these tales? One final point I would like to mention is the concept of meter in poetry. Meter can be viewed as the underlying structure that gives the foundation for a particular poem. I believe this concept exists for my object in the sense that the sculpture had to fit certain conventions. The façade on which it was located gave the sculpture a set form and the holiness of the church dictated its degree of propriety.

Another apparent problem in relating my object to poetry is the matter of creativity and improvisation. Nizami Aruzi in the Four Discourses emphasized that poetry does not need to stick to reality and that the poet can exercise his imagination. On the other hand, in my previous blog post I noted the naturalism that my object displays. I struggled to reconcile these conflicting notions without success until I found out that with my object, all was not as it seemed. As I will discuss later, the statues on the façade of the church of Saint-Denis were not necessarily of contemporary French kings.¹ In fact, there is some doubt as to whether they were French at all. Nevertheless, their garb is distinctly of “twelfth-century Parisian style,” in line with the twelfth-century creation of the statues.¹ If the kings were not from the twelfth-century or if their identity was ambiguous even to contemporary viewers, then this is an interesting and certainly creative choice on the part of the sculptor. It would have given the kings modern-day relevance while connecting the past to the present. Furthermore, this matter of clothing speaks to the issue of improvisation. As we have seen in class, improvisation in medieval poetry was a balance of being free to come up with and combine material while staying within certain bounds. Likewise, the creativity regarding the kings’ clothing stays within the limits of propriety and dignity set by the subject matter of the sculpture and the sculpture’s holy location.

Finally, in my previous blog post I noted that the sculptor may have crafted my object in the likeness of a French monarch to curry the favor of the current French monarch, and here I drew a connection to poetry in the Middle Ages. Yet, as certain scholars have noted, the statues may actually depict kings from the Old Testament.¹ Is the connection to poetry then lost? I think the resolution lies in considering Nizami Aruzi’s argument that a king needs a poet to preserve the king’s fame. If we extend this to past kings, as seems reasonable, we see that poets can serve the same purpose for rulers of bygone eras. They preserve the stories, the legends, and the splendor of those otherwise-forgotten leaders. Hence, the sculptor who crafted my object was working in the same way: to memorialize kings, whether they are of past or present.

It seems, then, that the connection between this twelfth-century limestone head and medieval poetry is not as artificial as my first blog post may have led one to believe. However, the relationship runs still deeper. In the first paragraph of this blog post I mentioned that the artist of my object and poets in the Middle Ages were both “confined and free in their work.” Throughout this blog post, I believe that this has been demonstrated in multiple ways. Taking the generalized concept of meter, for example, we have seen that it provided works with certain conventions, but the artist was free to act creatively within those bounds. In discussing improvisation, too, we have noted how the Saint-Denis statues and poetry played a balancing act between invention and the limits of propriety. Moreover, any such creativity was placed in check by the subject matter, such as the royal one presented by my object. Perhaps I did not see this overarching connection at first because when the head was severed from the remainder the church’s façade, it lost its confines along with its context.

¹Little, Charles T. Set in Stone: The Face in Medieval Sculpture. Yale University Press, 2006. 

The Origins of a Calligraphic Style

          The Kufic script, in nearly every book and art museum website I’ve thus far referenced, has been referred to as “lapidary.” Indeed, this style’s basic form makes it perfect for inscription on rocks, coins, and other non-parchment materials. The relatively simple nature of the Kufic characters may be symptomatic of the style’s age – Kufic, after all, was one of the first Arabic forms to develop. But part of me suspects there’s more to it than that. Might the style have been designed in part with the aforementioned inscriptions in mind? In order to investigate this question, my exhibit will focus on three classes of items: manuscripts, coins, and ceramics.

            The manuscripts come from a variety of time periods, and provide context for the Kufic style. Such context has potential to directly address the exhibit’s central question. If an earlier form of writing, for example, was both widespread and more ornate than the Kufic, then the Kufic style’s simplicity would have to have been intentional, and not just a product of its “primitiveness.”

The coins date from 715 to 1015 and contain Arabic inscriptions. All but one of these inscriptions could be considered Kufic, and the al-Mansur dirham from 755, with its extremely elongated letters, best typifies the form. The precise dating of these coins, and the fact that most of them contain many of the same words, allows us to directly watch the evolution of the Arabic language. A question to keep in mind, however, is the extent to which politics plays into these differences – the differences between an Umayyad and an Abbasid coin could represent change in the Arabic language over time, or it could just represent a change in court preferences.

The ceramic pieces, finally, provide a non-political example of writing on non-parchment. All three of these beautiful pieces come from the Samanid Empire. They provide a clear example of why the Kufic form was so popular in designs – the freedom it gave in elongating letters allowed for nearly unlimited flexibility.

With these objects, I will try tackling the question of why the Kufic form looks the way it looks. Note that this question raises a number of deeper, more general questions. How is a form of writing created in the first place? Is it possible for a single individual or group to “design” a form of writing? Or does writing evolve in a more piecemeal, haphazard fashion? And even if the development is haphazard, could an underlying force make the resulting form inevitable? 

More than Money: Tracing the Lifetime of a Medieval Coin

In their sheer ubiquity, it is easy to think of coins as things that have always been around and will always continue to be around. We rarely consider when a penny might retire, or the process by which a quarter was made, or the origins of the imagery on a nickel. Stated simply, coins are too often overlooked. In everyday life and even in looking at historical artifacts, we neglect the significance of coins, dismissing them as common and predictable. Especially when art museums carry enormous collections of coins, we lose the sense of each one having a story, a timeline. However, by looking more closely at individual coins it becomes apparent that they all had a beginning, middle, and end and existed in the context of a much bigger story.

Analysis of imagery and of the physical state of a Medieval coin can reveal details about its time period. For example, I found through researching the Coin of Romanos IV that a Medieval coin could tell us about the role of Christianity and the imperial class in 11^th century Byzantium. This led to more questions, some more technical and others conceptual. What would the process of minting have looked like? What tools were used in creating a coin? In what other ways might a coin be altered or debased? What does this say about the society in which the coin existed? I wanted to know more about how a coin would come to be and then progress through various stages in its life.

In my exhibit I will trace the lifetime of a Medieval coin, going beyond circulation via commerce and observing the production, transformation, and debasement of a common coin.

By incorporating objects like minting tools, coin weights, and clippings along with various coins, this exhibit will illustrate the story of a coin and what it can tell us about its Medieval world. It will cover technical aspects of production and regulation as well as look at physical alteration and the change in a coin's role over time. All of this can speak to the bigger story of the Middle Ages. My hope is that this exhibit will help make clear how multidimensional coins actually are. They are each their own object with a story behind them, and they are far more than just currency.

A Medieval Adoption: The Man of Sorrows and the Transmission of Ideas in the Middle Ages

The world of the medieval is a vast one, both geographically and temporally. It contains many traditions, many rulers, and many ways of life. One natural question that arises, then, is how much interplay was there between the various cultures of the Middle Ages? On the one hand, long-distance traveling was certainly not the norm, and local identities generally seem to have been strong and well preserved. Yet, one can also point to countless examples of cultural exchange. From pilgrimages to crusades to traveling scholars, many possible paths were open to allow for the diffusion of ideas. Thus, attempting to answer the question posed above quickly turns into a dizzying and overwhelming affair. Is there any way of getting a more visceral, even intuitive, feel for the extent and limitations of medieval cultural interplay? This exhibit seeks to do just this by employing one image, that of the Man of Sorrows, as an illustrative example of the geographic and temporal evolution of ideas in the Middle Ages. As a distinctly Christian image its spread is limited to Christian lands, but even so this exhibit will help us to gain a sense of what it takes to transmit an idea through different societies and through different centuries.

Beyond the limitation presented above, the Man of Sorrows image is particularly well-suited to this exhibit’s goal. It had a wide geographic spread, originating in the Byzantine world and reaching to the northern parts of Europe. Intriguingly, the mechanisms of the image’s transcultural movement can oftentimes be identified, partly because its unique depiction of Christ is not likely to have been independently created in different Christian regions. One problem with tracing many other unusual images is that they are limited in quantity (at least, in the quantity that has been preserved to the present day). However, the Man of Sorrows is found in abundance. Finally, it is a valuable image for this exhibit to focus on because it clearly demonstrates one central theme of medieval cultural diffusion: societies may have been willing to adopt “foreign” concepts, but they rarely did so without making such concepts their own. Hence, for instance, we can clearly differentiate Italian Man of Sorrows images from northern European equivalents from their material and iconographic natures.

This exhibit consists of three parts. First, it presents the origins of the Man of Sorrows image in the Byzantine Empire. Next, the exhibit moves to the Italian peninsula, where one can see a particularly interesting cultural interplay in the adoption of the Man of Sorrows. Finally, the exhibit ends in Germany and northern Europe, far away from the image’s beginnings but surprisingly faithful to many of its key attributes.

Curatorial Vision

The prevalence of censers devoted to the life of Christ demonstrates the continued influence of Christianity throughout the Middle Ages, despite Arab conquests. Their consistent yet diversified style emphasizes the fact that the underlying design of censers did not change significantly between the 7^th and 13^th century. Only slight stylistic differences, mainly the specific scenes on individual censers, arose across this period. With the onset of Arab rule, although Christianity was far more restricted around the Holy Land, its influence remained by way of iconography and religious objects, such as censers.

            This exhibit will explore two major aspects of the idea presented above: the constancy of censer style over time and the abundance of similar censers. The continuity of censer style metaphorically speaks to the persistence of Christianity, as censers from the 7^th and 13^th centuries resemble one another in both structure and iconography, demonstrating consistent Christian influence throughout the years. Additionally, the myriad of similar censers shows that casts continued to be made and that Christian influence continued to be spread, as various censers can be traced to Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, and other areas surrounding the Holy Land. Despite the Arab conquest of Jerusalem rather early on, Christianity survived the Middle Ages by way of iconographic objects of worship.

            These censers, presumably, were all made via the lost-wax process, a common method of casting during the Middle Ages. It is posited that originals copies made in the Holy Land were reproduced and given to pilgrims, who brought them home for veneration and worship. It is plausible that these casts were recast and further spread across the Byzantine and Arab Empires (though it would have been far more difficult to spread Christian iconography in Muslim lands).

            The sort of casting previously described brought me to my “Big Idea” (explained above). Knowing that censers were probably spread and exchanged far beyond the Holy Land, I wanted to determine if their structure/style was altered in any way, assuming that not only casts were made, but also new censers modeled after those which came out of the Holy Land. Going along with this idea, I attempted to find censers from other periods of the Middle Ages—beyond the 7^th century to be specific. I came across a variety of censers, some of similar style and some of much different style. This gave me hope that my argument would at least be feasible.

            Using groups of objects from different periods of the Middle Ages, I hope to show that despite various cultural influences and shifts of power, Christianity maintained some sort of influence. To accomplish this, I have chosen two objects from the 5^th-7^th century, five objects from the 7^th-10^th century, and three objects from the 13^th century. I wish to examine the style and structure of these, as to find evidence to support my Big Idea. Support for my claim will show that Christianity persisted in Arab lands, whether through underground meetings or approved but restricted religious gatherings. It might also demonstrate a precedent for tolerance, seeing as though six centuries is quite a long time to meet in secret. Overall, any information regarding the continuity of Christianity in majority Muslim lands will shed light on the perceived power of faith and iconography, as the censers described above must have held some continued importance throughout the Middle Ages since they did recur in various forms.