Meaningful Spectacles: Gothic Ivories Staging the Divine

OBJECTIVE: Define the form of a successful professional paper based upon actual papers presented in a juried publication. (A juried publication has recognized authorities in the field review articles for accuracy and originality.) You are responsible for a 6-page analysis of a professional art-journal article in the list below. Your paper should identify the general theme of the article, establish the main ideas and their substantiating evidence, and then discuss the organization of the paper so that you have a record of how a good idea should be presented in a published article. The double-spaced paper should have 1-1/2” margin on the left, 1” margin on the right, 1” margins top and bottom. Do not insert paragraph line breaks. Sarah M. Guérin, “Meaningful Spectacles: Gothic Ivories Staging the Divine,” Art Bulletin 95/1 (March 2013): 53-77.

Meaningful Spectacles: Gothic Ivories Staging the Divine
Sarah M. Guerin
The history of medieval art in the West is that of a struggle to transform into meaningful spectacle the spiritual impoverishment of visible things that had been delegated to a "second order" of signification.—Michael Camille, Gothic Idol, 19891
In The Sense of Order, Ernst Gombrich recounted a conversation he had with Erwin Panofsky in Cape Cod while they were walking Panofsky's dog Jerry in the summer of 1951:
He [Panofsky] told me how puzzled he had been in his student days by the expression "Gothic painting." He could understand the application to buildings or decoration, but in what sense could a painting be Gothic? I summoned my courage and asked "Do you think that all this really exists?," to which he replied with an uncompromising "yes." Only later I realized that in his lectures on Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism he had just committed himself to another attempt to justify the Hegelian tradition of governing spirits.2
Gombrich, citing this anecdote in the midst of a discussion of the thorny issue of Hegelian Zeitgeist, proceeds to take up the question Panofsky posed and to examine whether "there exists a link between a painting and its frame, or more specifically between all the elements of a Gothic altar, the shrine with its sculptures, the wings with their reliefs and the painted panels and the architectural detail of its fretwork setting." Gombrich's solution for complex objects like the late fifteenth-century High Altar of Blaubeuren Klosterkirch is a type of guilt by association: we the twentieth- and twenty-first-century art historians are so attuned to seeing late medieval paintings within Gothic frames that "Gothicness" is transferred to the painting or sculpture, itself devoid of such characteristic features as pointed arches, flying buttresses, or rib vaults. If the only quality these objects share is their spatial proximity, Gombrich avoids the uncomfortable ideological ground of having either frame or sculpture participate in an undefined and mystical Spirit of the Age. The paintings are, for Gombrich, Gothic merely by virtue of their habitual arrangement and our built-up expectations, and not the result of an "organic unity" of a period style.3
A version of Panofsky's question that summer day in Cape Cod leads to an examination of the rationale behind the pervasive use of microarchitectural forms on ivory carvings from the thirteenth century. Just before recounting his discussion with Panofsky, Gombrich had enumerated ivory dip-tychs as among the types of objects passively adorned with the fashionable architectural ornaments of the day.4 That such objects today are habitually called "Gothic ivories" seems self-evident: the material of elephant ivory and the miniature architectural frames are taken as their defining features (Fig.
1). Yet if we avoid treating the marriage of ivory and microarchitecture as axiomatic, we find the choice behind this union of material and ornamental form not only sheds light on the use of microarchitecture as a prevalent artistic choice in the thirteenth century but also demonstrates a visual response to a pressing intellectual and societal concern. In refusing to probe more deeply for fear of discovering Hegelian roots, Gombrich misunderstood Panofsky's thesis and brushed aside an instructive question for the understanding of a widespread phenomenon in the Gothic period: the use of microarchitectural frames.5
In Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951), Panofsky had tried valiantly to redefine an age's unifying aesthetic tendency, its style, by replacing Zeitgeist with habitus, or habit of mind.6 In the text's introduction, Panofsky speaks about indefinable "parallelisms" between intellectual trends and artistic forms, but these generalizations too are set aside in favor of a more concrete assessment of a specific time and place where philosophers and masons coexisted in close proximity and, he argues, intermingled. Panofsky's thesis was that the Scholastic intellectual formation shaped a mental habit that generated what we know as Gothic architecture. The "controlling principles" of Scholasticism, manifestatio and concordantia, structural clarification and reconciliation of authorities, define for Panofksy both the formal characteristics of Gothic and its nonlinear, almost dialectical, stylistic development.' While some have echoed Heinrich Wolfflin's cautionary words from his 1888 dissertation, "We still have to find the path that leads from the cell of the scholar to the mason's yard,"8 Panofsky's habitus has been adopted (and adapted) widely by such eminent thinkers as Pierre Bourdieu and Michael Baxandall,9 even if the specifics of Panofsky's argument are still debated.10
Thus, two "controlling principles" defined the main characteristics of the style of Gothic architecture and set the template for the changing morphology of that style. An icon-ographic rather than stylistic approach, though, obviates the need to define controlling principles. In examining microarchitecture as a bearer of meaning, in ascribing it a semio-logical role, I move away not only from Panofsky and Gom-brich's stylistic discourse but also from the traditional discussion of microarchitecture as ornament. Oleg Grabar defined ornament as "the aspect of decoration which appears not to have another purpose but to enhance its carrier,"11 and James Trilling echoed him in stating that "ornament is decoration in which the visual pleasure of form significantly outweighs the communicative value of content."12 Seeing ornament in general, and microarchitecture in particular, as a formal element superfluous to the function of a work ignores the semiotic functions of ornament and focuses exclusively on the terpnopoietic properties, a word Grabar coined for the pleasure-bringing quality of ornament.13