A Visual Pun at Vézelay: Gesture and Meaning on a Capital Representing the Fall of Man

Traditio ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 105-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirk Ambrose
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Body Movement ◽  
Salient Feature ◽  
Social Constraints ◽  
Medieval Art ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Prosper Merimee ◽  
French Author

In a description of a trip through the Midi of France in 1835, Prosper Merimée devotes a lengthy paragraph to the analysis of the Christ in Vézelay's Pentecost tympanum (fig. 1). He marvels at the carving of the figure's feet and “blessing” hands, as well as the placement of the thighs in relation to the torso. Later in his treatment of the abbey church and its sculpture, the author notes that figures on the nave capitals convey a “savage zeal” (zèle farouche) by means of posture and facial expressions. Gestures, in the widely construed, medieval sense of the word, clearly struck the celebrated French author as a salient feature of Vézelay's sculpture. Merimée sympathized with Romantic visions of the Middle Ages as a period less tainted by the stifling effects of civilization, and perhaps his fascination with the dramatic body movement carved throughout the abbey church reflects the belief that these were unfettered by the artistic or social constraints of the early nineteenth century. Yet throughout his description of Vézelay's sculpture, he never attempts to explore the meanings that the carved body might have held for a medieval audience; their meaning is not considered to be historical, but rather to be self-evident. The operative assumption that gestures in medieval art are transparent in meaning anticipates much subsequent scholarship.

scholarly journals Sospeso tra due mondi: il velo di San Giusto tra Bisanzio e Trieste

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 39-65
Author(s):  
Livia Bevilacqua
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Medieval Art ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Date ◽  
Careful Observation ◽  
Visual Evidence ◽  
The Many ◽  
General Studies

This article aims to a preliminary reassessment of the silk veil preserved in the Treasury of Trieste cathedral. The cloth is unparalleled in Byzantine as well in western medieval art, in that it is painted with tempera on both sides. It depicts a youthful martyr in a court costume, and bears an inscription that identifies the saint as St. Just. Since its alleged recovery from a reliquary in the early nineteenth century, the cloth has been often addressed by the scholars, who ascribed it either to a Byzantine or to a local master and dated it between the eleventh and the fourteenth century. Despite being referred to in several more general studies, it has been rarely considered individually. In this paper I address the many questions that the Trieste veil raises, including problems of chronology, provenance, function, and iconography. After careful observation and based on both primary sources and visual evidence, I argue that it was produced in Byzantium, possibly at an early date, to serve as a liturgical implement; later, it was brought to the West, where the saint was given a new identity and the cloth was reused as a banner after being painted on the reverse.

The Ballad Revival and the Rise of Literary History

2020 ◽  
pp. 83-97
Author(s):  
David Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
Century Literature ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
The Way

This chapter describes the rediscovery and reinvention of the ballad in the 1760s and 1770s, tracing the later impact of the resultant conception of the Middle Ages on nineteenth-century literature and scholarship. The chapter traces the way in which a notion of the ‘Gothic’ was differentiated, in the early nineteenth century, from the ‘medieval’ (a word newly coined around 1817) and goes on to look at the way in which the early beginnings of English literary history resulted from the antiquarian researches of the eighteenth century. It concludes with reflections on the extent to which it can be said there was truly a revival of the ballad, and posits that there was instead a revaluation something already there, with a new conferral of prestige.

Literature

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sverre Bagge
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Great Emphasis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Middle Ages

There is a continuous tradition of historical writing from the Middle Ages to the present day in all three of the Scandinavian kingdoms, as well as in Iceland, though admittedly it began later (not until the early fourteenth century) in Sweden than in the other countries. The works dating from the Middle Ages have already been discussed. Those of the Early Modern Period are of interest as evidence of learning and for an understanding of how “history” was viewed at the time, and also because they contain a number of documents from the Middle Ages whose originals have been lost. However, the beginning of modern scholarly historical writing is usually dated to the early nineteenth century, in Scandinavia as in the rest of Europe. The professionalization of history, which started in Germany, quickly spread to Scandinavia. Throughout Europe, this professionalization was related to a national revival that typically placed great emphasis on a nation’s medieval past....

Goethe the Writer

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angus Nicholls
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Friedrich Schiller ◽  
German Romanticism ◽  
Middle Phase ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Health And Sickness ◽  
The Middle Ages

The late Goethe’s apparent total condemnations of what he calleddas Romantischehave often been used to argue that, although Goethe lived through and influenced the period known as German Romanticism, he, like his friend Friedrich Schiller,did not belong to it. The middle phase of Goethe’s life (roughly 1786–1805) came to be defined as Weimar Classicism, a reassertion of Classical aesthetic models that rejected all things redolent of mysticism and the Middle Ages, which in the early nineteenth century meant all things Romantic. But with even a cursory investigation of Goethe’s famous remark on aesthetic health and sickness this narrative begins to unravel: only a few lines later he claims that theNibelungenlied, that paragon of the mystical German Middle Ages, isklassischand therefore healthy, suggesting that the surface opposition between the Classical and the Romantic is more complicated than one might have first thought.

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