Paul Binski

The Angel Choir at Lincoln and the Poetics of the Gothic Smile

This article argues that the smiling images produced in the thirteenth century deserve serious attention as signs of the centrality of the body to contemporary religious speculation. Smiling images are held here to be part of a re–evaluation of the totality of physical representation, especially, but not exclusively, in sculpture. The Angel Choir (1256–80) at Lincoln is taken as a central instance of this particular expressivity. It is suggested that this rhetorical order formed part of a wider order of representation which could involve not merely individual figures, but also the discourses of architecture, liturgy, biblical exegesis, music and light. Gothic ‘naturalism’, it is argued, is not merely shallow, but has a metaphysical character; it is not to be seen solely from the perspective of Aristotelianism or the vernacular culture of the romance. Instead, it is implicated deeply in the same insights into the body and soul which produced the medieval visual culture of the macabre.

Notes on artistic invention in Gothic Europe

qui pulcras imagines diligenter considerant ut consimiles faciant. Et unam excellentem pulcritudinem vel tractum colligunt de una imagine et aliam de alia ut omnes illas excellentias in una imagine ponant et pulcerrimam faciant. (who diligently ponder beautiful images in order to make similar ones: they gather together one excellent beauty and treatment from one picture, and one from another, in such a way that they place all these excellent features in one most beautiful picture.)

Humfrey Lovell and the Gates of Gonville and Caius College: A Note on the Sources

Abstract The Renaissance gates of Gonville and Caius College Cambridge are by local tradition attributed to Theodore Haveus. Mark Girouard noted the possible involvement of the royal architect Humfrey Lovell in their design. This short paper tidies up the documentary evidence which supports this idea. The gates were based on the study of Serlio by the London-based architect and artists employed by John Caius at his refounded college, but were put into effect both by Lovell and, after him, Haveus.

Reflections on la estoire de Seint Aedward le rei: hagiography and kingship in thirteenth-century England

The imagery of St Edward as formulated in thirteenth- century England is a neglected source for consideration of wider contemporary questions of royal policy and patronage. The discussion lends weight to the theory that Matthew Paris was the author of the most distinguished illustrated Life of St Edward, at Cambridge. It proceeds to discuss the ways in which older narratives about the saint were modernized to accord with contemporary concerns. The pictorial and textual presentation of Edwards kingship and relationship with his barons is regarded as central evidence of the way his life provided a yardstick of kingly conduct.

The ‘Prentice’s Bracket’ at Gloucester Cathedral

Abstract The 14th-century ‘Prentice’s bracket’ in the south transept of Gloucester cathedral has usually been thought to represent the fatal plunge of a young mason, watched by an older colleague. The implicit parallel is with Icarus and Daedalus, which suggests a moral lesson about the risks of Pride for artisans who worked at dangerous heights. However, this reading of the imagery may not be correct. In light of what is actually shown — the younger man is clearly attached to a vault — it seems more likely to represent a rescue through supernatural intervention. Numerous parallels for such rescues exist in medieval sources, particularly in the praise literature dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

The Heroic Age of Gothic and the Metaphors of Modernism

This article, which was first presented as a lecture, sets out some broad ideas about the domain of the aesthetic in medieval art and architecture. At its heart is a critique of common assumptions about mimesis, hermeneutics, and univalent categories. Beginning with the issue of levels of style, it argues that recent debates have tended to sever discussion of “low” or everyday forms from balanced consideration of “high” or lofty forms that are more usefully understood in relation to one another. The notion of the heroic—great deeds and accomplishments—is taken as a starting point for the proposal that formalist discussions of medieval art overlook or actually obscure deeper continuities between the Christian Middle Ages and wonders in the ancient and Islamic worlds. Ideas of lofty farsightedness and the difficulty of invention itself are seen as part of a continuum with the poetics and rhetoric of Antiquity. Doubt is cast on the validity of modernist metaphors for style and also on epistemologically modern categories of marginality that overlook the necessary connection between high and low style and displace pleasure and the aesthetic. Stress is placed instead on the linked and dialogic character of the senses and the media in medieval art. Finally, the aesthetics of wonder and the affective techniques of artists are discussed with a view to opening a new debate about the transformative role of art and architecture.

THE ILLUMINATION AND PATRONAGE OF THE DOUCE APOCALYPSE

This note identifies illuminations by the hand responsible for the initial to the French text at the start of the Douce Apocalypse; the artist appears to have worked on commissions linked to Oxford. It is suggested that the internal evidence of the Douce manuscript points to a change of patron in the course of its production after the illustrated Latin text was largely completed, and that it may have been begun for King Henry III and then given to the Lord Edward or Eleanor of Castile, who are shown in the opening initial, before about 1270. RÉSUMÉ Cette note identifie des enluminures de la main de l’auteur de l’initiale du texte français, au début de la Douce Apocalypse; l’artiste semble avoir travaillé pour des commandes liées à Oxford. Les preuves internes du manuscrit de Douce indiqueraient un changement de mécène en cours de production, une fois que le texte en latin avait été largement terminé, et qu’il aurait été commencé pour le roi Henri iii, puis donné à Lord Edward ou à Éléonore de Castille, qui apparaissent dans l’initiale d’ouverture, avant environ 1270. ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Dieser Vermerk identifiziert Illuminationen jenes Künstlers, der für die Initiale zum französischen Text zu Beginn der Douce Apocalypse verantwortlich zeichnet; er scheint an Aufträgen mit einer Verbindung zu Oxford gearbeitet zu haben. Es wird vorgeschlagen, dass der Befund der ie inter Douce-Handschrift darauf hinweist, daß sich der Auftraggeber im Zuge der Produktion änderte, nachdem der bebilderte lateinische Text zum Großteil fertiggestellt war, und dass sie für Heinrich III. begonnen und dann vor ca. 1270 an Lord Edward oder Eleonore von Kastilien übergeben wurde, die in den Eröffnungsinitialen zu sehen sind.

Villard de Honnecourt and Invention

This paper suggests that some of the drawings in the celebrated portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt shed light on medieval notions of the difficulty, as well as the ease, of invention. Frequently, Villard’s drawings are seen as disconnected ‘studies’, but it is argued here that in some cases their relationships are thoughtful, and may be understood by reference, rhetorical in origin, to wrestling as a metaphor for intellectual or artistic struggle. Though artistic invention was not discussed in the Middle Ages as much as it was in the Renaissance, it is suggested that Villard’s use of the imagery of fierce action belongs to a phase of heroic attainment in Gothic architecture particularly, in northern France around 1200.

A Note on the Hutton Conyers Charter and Related Fenland Manuscript

The name of Conyers is most readily associated with the magnificent falchion, perhaps once belonging to Richard, Earl of Cornwall as King of the Romans, used until 1860 by the Conyers family as a sword of tenure of their lands at Sockburn from the Bishop of Durham, and now in the possession of the Cathedral. Another neglected work of some interest is linked to this Yorkshire family: a decorated charter, dated 27 October 1320, licensing by letters patent the alienation in mortmain by Robert of Conyers of lands in Hutton Conyers, near Ripon, to a chaplain for the daily celebration of divine service in the chapel of St John the Baptist at Hutton Conyers. The value of decorated charters in providing dated or datable evidence for illumination has been recognized by Elizabeth Danbury, who first published an illustration of the Hutton Conyers charter.

Hierarchies and Orders in English Royal Images of Power

The relationship of the academic disciplines of history and art history has long been one of polite antagonism, founded (and I write as one who trained initially as an historian before turning to art history, and who is thus culpable on both fronts) on the eminently unreasonable assumption that history is in some way concerned with the real, and art history with the merely epiphenomenal, that is the marginal or subsidiary. I think few historians would seriously subscribe to this view now, though it should be said that the positivistic (essentially untheoretical) leanings of most art historians until the last decade or so, coupled with their inclination to practise connoisseurship, has undoubtedly opened them to the charge of lacking a genuinely historical method. On the face of it the rise of interdisciplinarity might be said to have subverted this hierarchy of subjects within the academy (and this is where an essay on hierarchies should perhaps begin). But here art historians cannot overplay their hand. In the field of medieval imagery it can fairly be said that our work has scarcely begun. The ideological structuring of medieval art has only become an object of serious enquiry very recently, though such studies as have appeared have very rightly gone to the heart of the matter in challenging glib assumptions about the nexus of social ‘reality’ and representation, and the notion that art – and medieval art especially – is transparently illustrative of prior or given social conditions..