Mostly Medieval:Images and Reflections

This semester for this first time I allowed students in my seminar (on the Virgin Mary in Medieval Art and Culture) to choose to make a work of art as the final outcome of their research projects, instead of requiring them all to write papers.  This is my favorite of the pieces that they made. To talk through it a bit: it was made on a mirror because it's about images of women in contrast to women's own self-images.  It represents St. Anne, the Virgin, and the Christ Child (although one of the problems with the piece is that it was supposed to center on imagery from books of hours, as patriarchal imagery projected at a female audience, but the real source images here are paintings by Durer and Leonardo da Vinci).  In one of my favorite touches, the images are actually made up of bits of advertisements cut from magazines: the Virgin's blue mantle is made mostly from tampon and sanitary napkin ads!   The idea is to liken the roles of book of hours imagery and the V...

. I've been wanting to write about this since I saw it in the flesh for the first time after the ICMA symposium at the CMA, however many weeks ago that was now (see me previous post on how things keep getting away from me).  This sculpture, a late medieval image of John resting on Jesus' breast, is one of the treasures of the museum's medieval collection, but the later medieval material isn't on display due to the all of the renovations.  The museum had arranged a small display of this material for the ICMA event. I was initially drawn to the toes of both figures: individually carved out little wooden digits.  Awesome!  Some are missing as you can see in the photo.  That could be just accidental damage; individually carved wood toes are going to break off easily.  But I keep imagining some whacked-out medieval nun snapping off Christ's missing big toe and sneaking it away in her garment so she could have a little bit of her divine husband all to herself...

This sculpture (a Protective Spirit from the palace of Assurnasirpal at Nimrud) is always a big hit with my Intro students when we go on our field trip to the CMA.  I can see why.   Seen in person, the details leap out at you.  Its almost like its shouting at you: toenails!  calf muscle!! kneecap!!! And can someone explain to what is going on with the kneecaps in ancient sculpture in general? Last year, their enthusiasm for him got us into a little bit of trouble.  We were in the small ancient near eastern gallery and a group of ladies who lunch types were perched on their folding stools in the gallery next door listening to a lecture about Greek vase painting.  I knew that my students were getting a little loud, but I didn't want to shut them down: how often do scrappy urban kids get excited about Assyrian relief sculpture?  Hell, how often does anybody get excited about Assyrian relief sculpture!  The Greek pots lecturer felt the need t...

First, I just want to express my deep affection for elephants.  Back in the day, in the summers during college to be precise, I had a job doing food service at the zoo back home in Portland (popcorn, snow cones, hot dogs, ice cream, etc), which just happens to have the largest herd of Asian elephants in captivity.  We would occasionally get to go behind the scenes of the animal exhibits and twice I went to the elephant house.  Once, we were there on a tour and they had one of the bulls in an enormous squeeze cage.  He saw us, starting swinging his trunk at us, and sprayed us with his snot.  Another time, we got to see a new baby that had been born overnight: he was surprisingly hairy.  I spent one summer by the elephant house at a cart that sold "elephant ears," big slabs of deep fat fried dough topped with butter and either cinnamon sugar or raspberry jam (or both, on either half, we would fold that in half and eat it as a sandwich for lunch). ...

So here it is, the opening image for the article I'm currently revising and, more immediately, a talk I'm working on for a symposium two weeks from today.  It's an ivory Virgin and Child statuette and the museum (our own CMA) says its 13th century Mosan.  It looks much more monumental here than in reality: it's only a few inches tall and I can image that it would have fit easily into an owner's hands.  It would have been an intimate object, then, and encountering it now in the museum is rather frustrating since its sealed away in a glass case.  I have a couple of other, older, images from the museum that help me imagine handling it up close, turning it in my hands (they also show the crown that it is now obviously missing and an additional base). Visually, my major interest in this image - and others like it - is in the Virgin's clothing and how it shapes the relationship between her and the child.  From the front, we see her man...

This is one of my favorite faces in Romanesque sculpture (specifically from Saint-Pierre at Aulnay, its a capital on the west front).  I like its puffy roundness and the way that seems to soften the stone.  I like how the shapes of the mouth and tongue are repeated by the eyes sockets and eyeballs.  I like how the mouth collapses inwards, even as the tongue, ears, tendrils (hair?), and forehead stretch out in different directions.  I've chosen it for my first post here because of the combinations it creates: soft and hard, mouth and eyes, in and out.  Because my purpose here is to join those things for myself.  I plan to pick an image and write about it for a while, so joining eyes and mouth in the sense of seeing and speaking - or in this case writing.  But a different kind of writing than my normal academic prose: something softer and more clearly connected to my insides.  I'll be letting those insides come out - even if the result is a bi...