Mostly Medieval:Images and Reflections

This is the Adamas stone image that I mentioned in the note I added at the end of my previous post .   I've been thinking about it since in relationship to a discussion in my medieval art course earlier this fall. I taught that course differently this time around, structuring it around the essays in the Medieval Art History Today - Critical Terms volume that was published last spring as a special issue of Studies in Iconography .  In the first half of the semester, I alternated between lectures and discussions of the essays, and in the second half, I only lectured twice and we focused on discussions.  Before each discussion, the students were assigned to do a "reading report" in Blackboard, answering a set of questions about the reading and posing a question or two for our class discussion.  I was able to see these before class and use them to plan the class. One of the more interesting discussions we had was about Karl Whittington's essay on "Queer....

A pair of firestones, from a twelfth-century English Bestiary.  And the first interesting thing is simply the appearance of stones in a book about beasts: these are beastly stones, then, and so lively rocks.  And as living things, of course, they are gendered.  One category distinction, that between animate and inanimate, is refused and so that another, between male and female, can be extended.  Their gendering is crucial to the meaning that the bestiary text assigns to the stones.  Kept apart, male and female firestones are perfectly safe; but put together, they immediately burst into flame.  Just so its better to the keep male and female religious apart - and for male religious to keep away from women entirely - otherwise the flames of lust will be ignited. But.  What is curious to me about this and other images of firestones, is the way they downplay the distinction of gender.  Firestones may be male and female, but in these images t...

I've loved this since I first saw it: it's a late Roman sarcophagus with Dionysus, unfortunately now faceless, gloriously sprawling in the center, leaning on one of his followers, and Ariadne, splayed out, asleep at his feet.  She is going to wake up to HIM.  And since this is a sarcophagus, her sleep has to be read as death, and that awakening as a final one, to - as I always say to students when I teach it - an ecstatic erotic encounter with the god.  And so, suddenly, death doesn't seem so bad. Right now, though, I'm thinking about it a little bit differently.  Because I'm thinking about how sleep is different from death.  Because sleep, and waking from it, repeat - over and over and over again.  Day after day after day.  Where death happens once (and I don't know what if anything happens afterwards).   So as asleep, Ariadne isn't going to awake just once to her encounter with the god, but is going to do so daily, over and over and over aga...

This is one of my own photographs from my time in Paris that I've altered quite a bit, trying to get it to look something like the photographs by Eugene Atget that I saw at an exhibit at the Musée Carnavalet.  Its close, but not perfect. The Atgets were remarkable for the sense they gave of the historicity of the city - of its past as both distant and somehow present at the same time.   Of the city, then, as somehow haunted by its past.  Many of the sights he photographed no longer exist after a century or more of urban renewal projects.  And yet the Marais - the area right around the Carnavalet - escaped most of that and so looks more like Atget's Paris than much of the rest of the city.  So you can walk out of that museum and still see something like what you saw in his photographs inside.  The photographs were intended to document the old city even as it disappeared and so to capture it for the future.  But they are now visibly old too, sep...

So more of Adam, this time one of his hands and importantly showing yet another odd part of his body - the attachment that runs between his thumb and his chest.  Of course I know why its there, technically, in order to support that bent up arm, otherwise it would most likely have broken off at the elbow.  These kinds of struts are visible on lots of stone sculptures, starting already in antiquity, and typically we just look past or through them, not allowing them to disrupt seeing the sculpted body as similar to our own.  But what strikes me about this particular one is its elegance, its graceful form, which seems to me to integrate it with the rest of his body and so ask for it to be taken seriously as part of that body.  We have already seen how weird this body really is, so why not add this in too: not only does he have two belly buttons , but also a growth of some sort that attaches his hand to chest, apparently from his fingernail and to a place near his nippl...

I was thinking about death a for while there, but didn't want to write anything about it, largely because I didn't think I had anything all that interesting to say.  I don't want to die, the end.  Or else, since we are all going to die anyway, what's the point of doing anything, and so why write at all?  Not surprisingly this post has been hard to write.  Its taken longer than most, this is my second try at it, and I'm still not sure its all that great.   I'm going to start with my image since that I know how to write about, at least most of the time. This is (part of) the transi of Jeanne de Bourbon -Vendome, which I've been visiting at the Louvre and so may explain my train of thought.  If you aren't familiar, a transi is a type of tomb sculpture that represents the dead and so decomposing body.  Look at the swirl of her entrails that have apparent burst out of her body - although the real bursting seems to happen in the draperies that frame he...

Yesterday was International Yarn Bombing Day and this was my small contribution: crocheted covers for the tops of some of the metal posts that edge the sidewalks all around Paris.  These happen to be right in front of the building where I'm staying. If you aren't familiar with yarn bombing, its a mash-up of traditional "feminine" craft techniques,  knitting and crocheting, with street art or graffiti and so installed in public spaces, most often without permission or authorization.  I've done this kind of work since I was a child -  I learned it from my mother who learned  from her mother... - putting it to more conventional applications, sweaters and scarves and the like.  I've been intrigued by yarn bombing for a while, but I've had a hard time  getting into doing it myself because I've been hanging on to some of the expectations about this type of work that bombing is meant to subvert.  I've wanted a pattern to follow.  To make measure...

I've been in Paris since early Friday morning.  And its great. To tell the truth I'd been feeling a little guilty about coming this year, since I'm not doing any work here that I couldn't do at home - no research, just writing, reading, and thinking.  And staying home I would have saved myself a lot of money. But then I got here and went for a walk in the city - from the apartment where I'm staying near the Place des Voges over to the cathedral and back - and all of that guilt just disappeared.  This is where I want to be.  The money is so worth it. Sunday I was planning on going to a group French language class, since I'm trying to do more in French when I'm here (and by the way, Blogger is in French right now and I don't know how to tell it to be in English).  But the class was cancelled at the last minute and so I went to the Cluny museum instead.  I've spent a lot of time at the Cluny in the past, when I was here looking at Virgin and Childs...

Its been an overwhelming few weeks.  The semester completely got away from me and I was running just to keep up.  Kalamazoo was amazing, which it never is, especially not the art history sessions.  Then I went straight to Jury Duty, which was just mostly sitting around and at least allowed me to finish up my grading, but then ended suddenly after I got called up for a criminal case and the defendant decided to plead guilty - to kidnapping, rape, and assault.  Finally my personal life seemed to fall apart around me and I still don't know what the resolution to that will be.  To make a first reference to the title of this post - the problem is something I said, compounded by the person to whom I said it, whether or not she said something to someone else, and so on.  I'm really not supposed to talk about it. Instead I'm trying to get back to that new awesome new Kalamazoo spirit by writing about some problems I had while I was working on my paper for the c...

This is the of the most sincere sculptures I know. I am going to talk a little bit about the sculpture first, and then come back to that, because I am using sincerity in a idiosyncratic way here. The sculpture: Its not medieval.  Despite the title I gave this blog, I'm realizing that the images I've written about here have not been "mostly" medieval.   It is part of a grave monument in Lakeview cemetery, which is just down the road from me here in Cleveland Heights, and is one of my favorite places in all of Cleveland.  When I first moved here, I walked in and through the cemetery on a regular basis and it became an important part of my mental landscape.  The monument consists of this standing sculpture, a second kneeling figure, and the actual tomb.  I'm assuming this is meant to be one of the three Maries coming to the tomb, with her jar of ointment in her hands. I like how its placed.  First, almost directly on the ground and so on your le...

 Yes!  My love for self-refentiality is finally satisfied with some elephants made from elephant ivory!  I encountered both while slogging through the 1504/1534/1634 inventories of the treasury of Saint-Denis (the 1504 inventory is reproduced in the 1534 document which is then reproduced in the 1634 list, which remarks on any changes to the objects over the previous hundred years).  Both are listed as game pieces, probably chess pieces, that were associated with Charlemagne - although that association can't be accurate.  The more elaborate object, the one on the left, is unlikely to have been a game piece since its quite large.  And both post-date Charlemagne, the one on the right is 9th or 10th century and the other is from the 11thC.  It seems to be Italian, while the first is Indian, but also Islamic; an inscription on it identifies it as the work of one Yusuf al Bahili.  You have to wonder by what path it came to be at Saint-Denis: mayb...