Download PDF | Herbert L. Kessler - Spiritual Seeing_ Picturing God's Invisibility in Medieval Art (The Middle Ages Series) (2000).
294 Pages
PREFACE
Even the great Augustine had to admit that he could not comprehend fully the relationship between corporeal seeing and spiritual vision. Throughout the Middle Ages the makers of images struggled to develop appropriate linkages between the contemplation of the objects they created and of the immaterial beings represented in them. At risk, of course, was the sin of idolatry, in which worship was directed to the physical form before the eyes rather than toward God.
But the issues were far more complex. For one thing, belief that God had appeared on earth where he was seen and adored underlay Christian faith; did images not confirm the truth of that tenet? For another, Christians held that Hebrew Scripture had been fulfilled and (most of) its laws abrogated by the incarnation of Christ; should the prohibition of images in the Second Commandment still hold? And, if Christ and his saints were still alive in heaven, why could depictions of them not participate-to some extent at least-in proper veneration of their unseeable presences?
The eight essays collected in this volume analyze some of the ways Byzantine and medieval Western art engaged the problem of the spiritual worth of images. Several draw on writings about art as well as on the depictions themselves to disclose how the very subversion of the Jewish prohibition of images made art a Christian imperative, how the elision of the fundamental distinction between historical narrative and portrait served to demonstrate that Christ and his saints were alive in heaven and still accessible, and how the synthesis in art of diverse sacred texts was taken, in itself, as a mechanism of spiritual seeing. Others focus on such devices as copies, the evocation of emotions, and the use of affective materials, developed to bridge physical representations to their immaterial prototypes.
Reflecting my conviction that theoretical debates of the thelo- gians were implicated in the production of images, all eight essays assert the important role art played in Christian self-definition during the Middle Ages. Specifically, tay elaborate my view that various aspects of sophisticated works of medieval art-sub matter, form, and material-were devised to engage the viewer in an anagogical cess, offering spiritual readings of texts, elevating established categories of objects ind iconographies, and deploying materials in such a way that physical presence is simuta neously asserted and subverted.
Art fully was a means to realize the central claim of medieval theory: to show the invisible by means of the visible ("per uisibilia inuisibilia demonstrajare"). Eugene Vance first proposed the idea to me of publishing a collection of my recent essays and worked energetically to accomplish the task; I am deeply grateful to him for his support.
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