Another Look at the Wise and Foolish Virgins in Gothic Sculpture

76 Jung Chapter 2 Compassion as Moral Virtue: Virgins in Gothic Sculpture Compassion as Moral Virtue: Another Look at the Wise and Foolish Virgins in Gothic Sculpture Jacqueline E. Jung Introduction [Charismatic art] creates a magnified, exalted semblance of life. Its basic impulse is to create a world grander than the one in which the reader or viewer lives, a world of beauty, sublime emotions, heroic motives and deeds, godlike bodies and actions, and superhuman abilities, a world of wonders, miracles, and magic – in order to dazzle and astonish the hum- bled viewer and lift him, by emulation or envy, up to the level of the world or the hero represented.1 For this art historian, who long ago relinquished any resistance to the enchant- ments of Gothic sculpture, the question of the relationship between the fictive bodies inhabiting the walls, piers, and portals of churches and their embodied models, makers, and beholders has always been fundamental.2 My interest was, if not sparked, then certainly heightened and encouraged by Stephen * I will be forever indebted to Heiko Brandl and Andreas Waschbüsch for allowing me to exam- ine and photograph the Virgins of Magdeburg Cathedral during their cleaning in 2009, provid- ing access to the cathedral’s gallery level, and sharing their knowledge of the figures’ origins and technical aspects with me. The photos in figures 2.10 and 2.11 were made at that time. Support from the Griswold fund at Yale University enabled the travels that yielded the photos of Strasbourg Cathedral and the newly restored portal at Magdeburg. This paper took shape at a week-long interdisciplinary Mellon seminar held at Northwestern University on “The Middle Ages in Translation” in July 2013. I am grateful to Barbara Newman, who organized that event, and the many esteemed participants – especially Stephen Jaeger – whose comments helped me clarify and refine my ideas. Barbara Rosenwein has likewise offered generous and helpful insights on the material presented here. Thanks, finally, go to the perceptive anony- mous readers who steered me away from some important infelicities, and to Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak and Martha Rust for including me in this volume. 1 C. Stephen Jaeger, Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West (Philadelphia, 2012), p. 41. 2 This topic is explored, particularly with respect to the 13th-century programs at Naumburg and Strasbourg, in my book in progress, Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004363809_004 Compassion as Moral Virtue: Virgins in Gothic Sculpture 77 Jaeger’s writings on the conveyance of medieval social ideals through the eloquent bodies of clerical schoolmen, highly trained in the performance of charisma, and eventually through their stone surrogates, the elegant bodies that graced the facades of church buildings.3 The notion that the sculptural arts of the High Middle Ages, with their idealized naturalism, suppleness of presentation, and psychological suggestiveness, sought to harness and irradi- ate something of the charisma once ascribed to living persons was and remains a galvanizing idea in my own research. Being rooted in social practices and conceptions, it offers a way of thinking about the mimetic achievements of Gothic artists that has more historical nuance than the now-familiar invoca- tion of the 13th century’s sudden twin “discoveries” of nature and of the individual4 or, at the opposite extreme of historiography, the romanticizing mode of interpretation that elided present and past forms of response, often in the service of nationalist agendas.5 With several notable exceptions – Paul Binski, Thomas Dale, Matthew Reeve6 – art historians have been slow to explore the implications of Jaeger’s work, but the renewed interest in ques- tions of mimesis, presence, and psychological expressivity in Gothic sculpture in recent years should open the door to fresh engagements with the ideas put forward there.7 Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture, forthcoming from Yale University Press. The present essay emerges from that project. 3 Especially Jaeger, The Envy of Angels. Cathedral School and Social Ideals, 950-1200 (Philadelphia, 1994), which appeared the year I began graduate study. 4 The question of nature and the individual has preoccupied interpreters of Gothic since the early 20th century; see Wilhelm Vöge, “Die Bahnbrecher des Naturstudiums um 1200” (1914), repr. in Bildhauer des Mittelalters: Gesammelte Studien (Berlin, 1958), pp. 63-97, and most re- cently the catalog Der Naumburger Meister: Bildhauer und Architekt im Europa der Kathedralen, eds. Hartmut Krohm and Holger Kunde, 3 vols. (Petersberg, 2009, 2011). For a sensitive account of the question, see Jean A. Givens, Observation and Image-Making in Gothic Art (Cambridge, 2005). 5 See Jacqueline E. Jung, “France, Germany, and the Historiography of Gothic Sculpture,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, 2nd expanded edi- tion, ed. Conrad Rudolph (forthcoming, Malden, MA, 2018). 6 Paul Binski, Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170-1300 (London, 2005), pp. 257-59; Thomas E.A. Dale, “The Individual, the Resurrected Body, and Romanesque Portraiture: The Tomb of Rudolf von Schwaben in Merseburg,” Speculum 77 (2002), 707-43; Matthew M. Reeve, “Gothic Architecture and the Civilizing Process: The Great Hall in Thirteenth-Century England,” in New Approaches to Gothic Architecture, eds. Robert Bork, William W. Clark, and Abby McGehee (Farnham, Surrey, 2011), pp. 93-109. 7 See, for example, Martin Büchsel, “Monströse Gefühle – die Gefühle von Monstern: Überlegungen zu emotionalen Strukturen in der marginalen Skulptur der Romanik und Gotik .

Load more