Hans Belting Bild und Kult: eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst, Kunst, ���� ������� ���������
Bild und Kult has has had an enormous impact since its publication publication in German in ���� and its translation into English under the title Likeness and Presence: A History o the Image beore the Era o Art (����). (����). Te purpose o this article is to give some account o its influence and, in particular, to discuss its connection to Belting’s subsequent work, much o it on modern and contemporary art. At first glance, this might seem to represent an abrupt departure rom the history o the cult image that is Bild und Kult ’s ’s ocus. Te book’s scope, however, is ar broader than even its vast chronological span – rom Late Antiquity through the Reormation – initially implies. Afer an introduction that makes an effective argument or an interdisciplinary approach adequate to ‘the deeper levels o experience exper ience that images probe’, Belting systematically sets about his task o ‘adopt[ing] a historical mode o argumentation that traces them back to the context in which they historically played their part’ (p.�). Drawing on the testimony o legends o supernatural origins, visions and miracles, Belting succinctly defines what he regards as his central challenge: ‘i we remain within the millennium with which this book is concerned, we are everywhere obstructed by written texts, or Christianity is a religion o the word. I we step outside this millennium into the modern period, we find art in our way, a new unction that undamentally transormed the old image [. . .] Art history thereore simply declared everything to be art in order to bring everything within its domain, thereby effacing the very difference that might have thrown light on our subject’ (p.�). Seeking to overcome the barriers HANS BELTING’S
Hans Belting photographed by Felix Gruenschloss, shortly beore a lecture at the Karlsruhe Institute o echnology, ��th January ����.
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represented by Art with a capital A, Belting tells the story o the image rom the earliest icons that survive at Sinai and Rome through the development o the altarpiece in late medieval Italy. oday, twenty years afer its publication, it is difficult to convey the rereshing shock Belting’s book conveyed to a young art historian eager to think in terms o the unction, not simply the attribution, dating and iconography, o medieval images. More compelling, however, than the book’s grandiose historical panorama and its sheer range o reerence is its wealth o ideas, governed by a clear storyline, namely, the origins and transormation o the cult image in its passage rom East to West across one-and-a-hal millennia, and a still clearer – perhaps too clean-cut – conceptual structure, neatly summarised by the work’s subtitle. Art, image, cult: all three terms demand definition and invite disputation, especially when deployed across such a broad canvas, all the more so given that the German word Bild is rich in connotations in ways that its English equivalent is not. In Belting’s later work, the difference, in German, between ‘image’ and ‘picture’ has permitted him to emphasise the notion that a picture is a medium that permits the image to acquire a presence tantamount to that o the body. Art history thus becomes a history o media as well as o the body, aspects that come into sharper ocus in Belting’s more recent book, not yet translated into English, Das Echte Bild (����).� Bild und Kult ’s more immediate aim was to recast the relationship between the art o Byzantium and the West, a touchstone topic or early modern as well as medieval art. Indeed, one o the accomplishments o Belting’s book, or which all medievalists ought to be grateul, is that it came as a clarion call to modernists that modernity, however defined, can only be understood against the oil, not just o Antiquity, but also o all that intervened. Focusing on the interrelationship o unction and pictorial rhetoric, Belting helped tip the balance in discussions o medieval art (and beyond) rom issues o production to conditions o reception. As part o this process, Belting, with others, redrew the art-historical topography o the Mediterranean, charting cross-currents stirred up by cultural exchange, colonisation and the Crusades. Still more important, he recast the origins o the independent easel painting, the canonical vehicle o modern art. Belting’s book crystallises a turning point, or himsel and or the history o art. Beore considering its impact, however, one must consider its genealogy, adumbrated by Belting himsel in his review o Otto Demus’s Byzantine Art and the West (����).� Remarking that ‘new methods, other than those analyzing stylistic orms, are needed to clariy these maniold connections’, Belting nonetheless observed that Demus was ‘devising a kind o program or uture
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Front cover to Hans Belting, Bild und Kult: eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst , ����.
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research’. Belting then quoted his ellow Byzantinist: ‘“Had it not been or the transormation o Hellenistic panel painting into Byzantine icon painting and the transer o this art orm to the West, the chie vehicle o Western pictorial development would not have existed or would have come into existence a good deal later [. . .] O course, the Byzantine models were, rom the very beginning, not only subjected to a thorough transormation, but also adapted to serve the specifically Italian requirements or altar panels and a new kind o devotional image”.’ As i defining his plan, first or Das Bild und sein Publikum: Form und Funktion rüher Bildtaeln der Passion (����), which ocused on the reception and transormation o the image o the Man o Sorrows in the late medieval West, then or Bild und Kult , Belting added: ‘It is precisely this process o adapting and transorming Byzantine models on which research will have to concentrate’. Were medievalists to come cold to Belting’s most recent work, which has ocused on modern and contemporary art, they might, in addition to being impressed by the extraordinary scope and reach o his scholarship, be amazed to learn that the first hal o his career was spent as one o the most distinguished Byzantinists o his or any other generation. Just as Bild und Kult divides the history o European art into two distinct phases, so too, Belting’s career can be viewed as alling into two parts. In each case, however, the second phase is inextricably linked to the first. Far more than a synthesis o his own contributions to the study o Byzantine art and its reception in the Latin West, Belting’s book also stands as his envoi to art history itsel. It is as i in finishing with the subject or himsel, Belting invited his colleagues to join in saying goodbye to all that. Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? (����) questioned precisely the kind o grand narrative that he would present in Bild und Kult , even as that book provided the cornerstone o a series o subsequent publications that, taken as a whole, chart an arc that is Hegelian in its dimensions. With the revised republication o Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte (����), the removal o the question mark converted Belting’s query into statement o act. Belting’s attention turned subsequently to a more amorphous, yet labile quantity, the image, not so much in the Middle Ages as in contemporary media. Tis tack in Belting’s work, which insists on paired oppositions between, on the one hand, word and sign and, on the other hand, image and body, coincides with and has in part propelled the so-called ‘iconic turn’. o re-review Bild und Kult , thereore, is to re-examine the trajectory o the history o art, in at least one o its arcs, over the past generation. Te book set the stage or a still more ambitious, i problematic, recasting o the concept o
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the image, one that in Belting’s sel-proclaimed ‘anthropology o the image’ (Bild-Anthropologie) – itsel part o a broader turn towards anthropology in the Humanities, above all in Germany – aspires to a level o generality that transcends time, place and, in many respects, the particularities o culture.� In its insistence on the image as a substitute or the body and on both the body and the physical image as entities onto which imagined images can be impressed or projected, Belting’s anthropology o the image finds notable analogies in the historical anthropology o Jean-Claude Schmitt. Schmitt’s landmark article, ‘La Culture de l’imago’ (����), like Belting’s more recent work, insists on a continuum among material and immaterial images, extending rom concrete embodiments to the imagination and, ultimately, the imago dei as the governing concept in medieval characterisations o what it means to be human.� In their philosophical bent, French and German historical anthropology differ quite strongly rom their Anglo-American counterpart, which tends in turn to be more sociological in character. I Bild und Kult ocused on the image beore art, Belting’s subsequent work has come to rest on what he sees as avatars o the medieval image in the present. In this scheme o things, medieval ‘art’ (cast by Vasari as an egregious exception to the right rules o representation that governed in Antiquity and that were laboriously recovered, then surpassed, in the Renaissance), proves instead to represent a more universal ontology o the image. In this view, the image, striving or reunification with the body or which it stands, remains ree to act unencumbered by theology or, in Belting’s view, its modern equivalent, art-historical theory. Te Middle Ages, rather than representing the great exception to the rule, instead defines a norm that itsel undergoes a renaissance o sorts in the present. o this extent, Belting’s understanding o the exceptional character o Western art shares a great deal with the views o E. H. Gombrich, although by contrast the value that Belting places on the art o the Renaissance until the all o the ancien regime is almost entirely negative. Belting’s conjunction o what traditionally were art-historical opposites – the medieval and the modern – goes a long way to explaining a trend, especially in Germany, that began in the ����s, namely, the mixing o contemporary and medieval art in exhibitions and museum installations that or better (or worse) instrumentalise medieval art to explore purported intersections between premodern and post-modern modes o image making, rom body and perormance art to installation art and beyond. � Always provocative, such comparisons also have their limits, no less than the analogies drawn by literary critics between deconstruction and negative theology.� Not that moderns working on medieval
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Christian art need give it any credence, but in the Middle Ages there existed a ground o meaning that in the meantime has allen away. Belting’s re-evaluation o modernity in the light o the Middle Ages thus becomes part o a larger set o historical narratives attempting to cope with secularisation and, in particular, Weber’s concept o disenchantment, which looms larger than Belting acknowledges in his interpretive ramework.� Te same could be said o Walter Benjamin, in particular his classic essay on ‘Te Work o Art in the Age o Mechanical Reproduction’, first published in French in ����.� Mentioned only once in Bild und Kult (p.��), Benjamin’s essay defines many o the terms o Belting’s argument. Benjamin’s ‘aura’ is not the same as Belting’s ‘cult’, above all in that Benjamin’s concept extended to include much o what Belting designates as art. Nonetheless, Benjamin identifies ‘two polar types’ o the work o art, just as Belting defines two ages, one beore and one afer the work o art. ‘With one’, states Benjamin, ‘the accent is on the cult value (Kultwert ); with the other, on the exhibition value ( Austellungswert ) o the work’.� Te ‘ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most proane orms o the cult o beauty [. . .] developed during the Renaissance and prevailing or three centuries’.�� Benjamin’s understanding o medieval art, his romanticisation o the concept o aura (rooted in Riegl and, earlier still, in ‘Einühlungsästhetik’), and his distinction between ‘Kultwert ’ and ‘Ausstellungswert ’, all have come in or criticism, in particular, because the mass reproduction o works o art in the late Middle Ages, even i it eventually contributed to the unravelling o ‘aura’ in the Reormation, had, at least at first, no impact on their efficacy whatsoever.�� Belting’s book and, even more so, his subsequent work participate in a nostalgia or immediacy and presence t hat has most clearly been enunciated in Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht’s Production o Presence (����), which appeals to (problematic) notions o Eucharistic presence as defined in the Middle Ages.�� Medieval art was hardly as ree o mediation and effects o representation as some o its champions would apparently like to believe.�� Religious convictions are hardly incompatible with – dare one use the word? – the aesthetic cunning o much medieval art, witness its renewed appreciation in the modernity rom which Belting too stringently divorces it.�� Te survival and study o medieval art have always been inflected by the art o the time in which i t was appreciated or depreciated in turn. Moreover, medieval art played a seminal role in shaping the course both o modern art and modern art history, both o which in turn constantly inormed one another. Whatever one thinks o the results, Belting’s work provides eloquent and effective testimony to
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this ongoing dialogue.�� Te massive dislocation (and destruction) o monuments ollowing the French Revolution and subsequent secularisations coincided with the embodiments o nostalgia represented by artistic movements such as the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, the Nazarenes and, more generally, the Gothic Revival.�� Medieval art in turn had a proound impact on the development o modernism, not only in the work o writers such as Morris and Ruskin, but, closer to the time o art history’s emergence in Germany, in the work o authors such as Riegl and Worringer, both o whom looked to the art o Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages or embodiments o a non-Classical aesthetic.�� Many o the ‘ounding athers’ o art history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were, not coincidentally, medievalists. One can hardly hope or medieval art to assume similar prominence in the artistic developments o our own day. Nonetheless, similar interactions can be observed, a dialogue in which Belting, in the light o his position at the Staatliche Hochschule ür Gestaltung in Karlsruhe, has played an influential role. Matthew Barney’s exhibition Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail (Schaulager, Basel, ��th June to �rd October ����) represented only the most recent maniestation o this phenomenon. �� Te title alone evokes medieval devotional imagery, no less than did Chris Burden’s perormance piece rans-Fixed (����), in which he (in)amously had himsel nailed to a Volkswagen Beetle that emerged rom a garage with its engine roaring to imitate shrieks o pain.�� Te nails that had pierced Burden’s hands later were installed in a reliquary-like container made out o Plexiglas, an uncanny anticipation o the Schaulager’s presentation o the ‘relics’ o Barney’s artistic athleticism. In both works, the body o the artist becomes a Christ-like incarnation o virtue, an inimitable ‘true image’ that can only be exhibited through a series o simulacra that are then collected like relics. What the pilgrims who flock to galleries to view traces o these perormances truly believe or expect is another matter. It is by no means clear that the contemporary artist makes a convincing or charismatic hermit saint. Despite such experiments, it is difficult to imagine the study o medieval art once again assuming a seminal role in the discourse on contemporary art. Given, moreover, the encrustations o criticism that surround and condition both the production and reception o art today, one can hardly accept at ace value Belting’s repeated approximation o art history to theology – both, as he construes them, afer-the-act attempts to constrain the power o the image. In Bild und Kult , the textual sources on which Belting draws are sent packing to a useul appended anthology, almost as i to keep the images pure o their baleul
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influence. At a distance, Belting’s philippics against theology (and, to a lesser extent, theory) participate in a larger oscillation in the valuation o discursive versus visual experience, o which the story o the image that he tells itsel orms a part. Belting tells the story in such a way as t o discount or downplay the discursive character o what has come to be called visuality.�� Whether word and image, however, remained so separate, especially in the monastic experience o what we commonly call works o art, is very doubtul. Moreover, in the medieval West, theologians had remarkably little to say that is o direct relevance to medieval imagery and seldom extended their remarks beyond a small set o stereotypes. In other contexts, their writings, ar rom suggesting the hostility Belting suggests, are more indicative o a certain sovereign indifference. In contrast, on theological matters they suggest remarkable sophistication regarding issues o representation – or example, on the relationship o the visible to the invisible, which was central to debates over the Incarnation and, hence, o images. In the light o the sums o money poured into patronage, their relative reticence could in most contexts be construed as either toleration or tacit approval, as opposed to the Byzantine East, where image theory remained central to definitions o orthodoxy. Despite the barriers, and in no small measure due to Belting’s influence, medieval art is enjoying something o a renaissance, not least i n the study o the Renaissance itsel. Te partition between the medieval and early modern suddenly seems quite porous, a breaking down o boundaries that was initiated by historians beore it was taken up in literary studies, again in the ����s. �� In response to Belting’s definition o the Middle Ages as the era o the image beore that o art, scholars o the Italian Renaissance have begun to explore the extent to which cult images and the attitudes associated with them persisted into the modern era.�� Medievalists, in turn, have looked with a resh eye at the ways in which medieval images could be construed as aspiring to the condition o art, i by that word is meant, at least in part, images that cultivate and recognise their artifice, suggest sel-awareness on the part o their patrons and makers, and, in sp ecifically Christian contexts, develop various visual strategies to mark the limitations o the image when it comes to representing the invisible.�� Whereas a book such as Klaus Krüger’s Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren: Ästhetische Illusion in der Kunst der rühen Neuzeit (����) traces the origins o sel-reflexive strategies deep into the Middle Ages, others, such as Christopher Wood’s Forgery, Replica, Fiction: emporalities o German Renaissance Art (����) and Anachronic Renaissance (����, co-authored with Alexander Nagel), although deeply indebted to Belting, challenge standard accounts o secularisation by insisting on reerentiality and
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Frontispiece and title page to Hans Belting, Bild und Kult: eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst , ����.
what they call ‘substitionality’ – in essence, iconic modes o participation – as opposed to representation. Such complications and qualifications undercut the simplicity o Belting’s clear separation o ep ochs, but testiy to the attraction and persuasiveness o the questions that structured his inquiry. Revisiting Belting’s monumental book urther provides an opportunity to reflect on the proound and persistent differences between art-historical scholarship in the English-speaking and German-speaking worlds. Tese differences stem in part rom a dialogue des sourds, not least because ever ewer AngloAmerican scholars, let alone their students, read German with ease (to which it might be added that some German scholars, i not Belting, cultivate a prose style, including English neologisms and barbarisms, that defies easy reading). �� Te differences in approach, however, cannot be attributed to linguistic barriers alone, above all because several o Belting’s books (i not, unortunately, his monumental Die Erfindung des Gemäldes: das erste Jahrhundert der niederländischen Malerei, co-authored with Christiane Kruse, ����) have been translated into English. Moreover, a programmatic statement o Belting’s method, ‘Image,
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Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology’, appeared, late but in earnest, in ���� in Critical Inquiry .�� Despite these translations, it must be said that Belting’s impact on Englishlanguage scholarship has been limited. Te differences between Belting’s sel-proclaimed Bild-Anthropologie (Image Anthropology) and the most relevant strands in Anglo-American scholarship can best be summed up i one compares Belting’s book to, on the one hand, David Freedberg’s Power o Images (����), virtually contemporaneous with Bild und Kult (����), and, on the other hand, W. J. . Mitchell’s Picture Teory (����).�� Tese books participate in what has variously been called the ‘pictorial’ or the ‘iconic turn’, but in different ways. Whatever it represents, the ‘iconic turn’ points in diametrically different directions. Belting sees art history as akin to theology in so ar as it quashes or resists the age-old identification o images with living bodies. In contrast, Freedberg distinguishes between the two, assigning theology a constructive role: ‘It is not just psychology that is at stake, but also the relations between theology and psychology’, he argues, adding that Belting ‘ails to see that the general psychological theory is already present in the Byzantine theory o images’. �� Rather than characterising theologians as censors, Freedberg casts them as agents provocateurs.�� Freedberg claims that what he considers typical or the Middle Ages proves normative or all o human history, not just in the West. In Freedberg’s orceul ormulation ‘the ontology o holy images is exemplary or all images’.�� I anything, Belting’s work subsequent to Bild und Kult , above all his recent study o optics and perspective (Florenz und Bagdad: eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks , ����), has, in ocusing on questions o perception, drawn closer to Freedberg’s position. �� Nonetheless, it remains telling that whereas in America advocates o the ‘pictorial turn’, in particular W. J. . Mitchell, ocus on pictures, the mass media and reer to Panosky, by contrast, in Germany, the ‘iconic turn’ ocuses on the body as medium and takes Aby Warburg as its obsessive point o reerence. By insisting on various orms o cultural embeddedness, American image theory, whether presented under the rubric ‘visual culture’ or ‘visual studies’, presents a very different picture. In Mitchell’s words: ‘Whatever the pictorial turn is, then, it should be clear that it is not a return to naive mimesis, copy or correspondence theories o representation, or a renewed metaphysics o pictorial “presence”. It is rather a post-linguistic, post-semiotic rediscovery o the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies and figurality.’�� Amidst this range o theoretical options, or anyone who still believes in the conditioning effects o culture, society, class and gender, let alone other actors, there is reason to be sceptical
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about all general claims regarding the nature o images. Such claims can be taken to underwrite a globalisation o art history at the price o an unattractive homogeneity. Belting himsel has contributed to this trend, partly by virtue o his laudable efforts to expand the sometimes parochial purview o German art history, which, in a urther contrast to American art history, remains – with notable exceptions – myopically ocused on the art o Europe.�� It is too early to predict whether, as an outgrowth o Belting’s book on the ‘history o the image beore the age o art’, the history o art will give way in turn to an all-inclusive history o images. Although widely admired, Belting’s Bild-Anthropologie has less ofen been imitated, above all in the United States, but also in Germany. Belting ocuses almost obsessively on images o the body, whereas the cosmos o images embraces many other subjects, not all o which can be simply subsumed under the category o dreams or projections o the human imagination. Moreover, there are competing visions o what, in Germany, ollowing Gottried Boehm, is called the ‘iconic turn’,�� not to mention the question o whether more empirically minded scholars working in other t raditions – whether in the United States or elsewhere – will ollow the Germans’ characteristically philosophical lead.�� Whereas Boehm champions a hermeneutic o the image independent o texts, Horst Bredekamp’s Bildwissenschaf , in ways different rom Belting’s, seeks to subsume all images, including scientific imaging and mass media, to an expanded art-historical domain that, as always, established itsel in art and social practice long beore it did in academia.�� Such debates have serious stakes, not simply or anything so narrow as the ‘discipline’, however defined, as or the understanding o something as important as what Belting himsel called ‘the most interesting question o all: why images?’.�� An essay such as this cannot pass in review t he extraordinary number o specialised topics that Belting’s synthesis brought together by, again in his own words, ‘overcoming the narrow treatment o the topic that is prevalent today’. �� Some o his suggestions have garnered assent, others not. In its ocus on the cult image, however defined, and its impact, Belting’s book, despite its vast coverage, provides a oreshortened vision o medieval art that excludes many other genres and media that do not fit comortably with his ramework. By his own admission, narrative imagery plays no role.�� Neither, by and large, does sculpture or metalwork, both o which or much o the Middle Ages were valued more highly than painting and played critical roles in cult contexts. So powerul is Belting’s storyline that the cult image has sometimes come to stand or medieval art tout court . Te Western monastic tradition, which had a decisive impact on attitudes towards
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images in the medieval West, gets short shrif. Te book too ofen alls back on appeals to popular culture when, in the Middle Ages, as Peter Brown was among the first to insist, divisions between high and low were hardly as well-defined as in modernity.�� Belting’s definition o just what constitutes a cult image has itsel been called part o a ‘kunstwissenschaflicheIkonenmystik’.�� Whereas Belting succinctly, yet broadly, defines the sphere o the cult image as that w hich ‘deals with people and with their belies, superstitions, hopes and ears in handling images’, historians o liturgy would counter that the concept o cult more narrowly represents a corporate paradigm. Not all images representing persons were regarded as miraculous ‘living’ images, a privilege that could on occasion also be extended to other types and genres, narrative imagery included. In his recent re-evaluation o the origins o apsidal decoration in the medieval West ( Te Apse, the Image and the Icon: An Historical Perspective o the Apse as a Space or Images, ����), Beat Brenk (perhaps unairly) does not mention Belting’s book or even his landmark article on S. Maria Antiqua, arguing that cult imagery and the practices associated with it, ar rom an inheritance rom Antiquity, by and large represent inventions o later Late Antiquity.�� In contrast, Belting, seeking to sustain the onset o modernity c.���� as his great divide, presents a relatively seamless transition between ancient and Christian cult practices, with reservations regarding power and presence given as expressions o textual (and theological) anxiety. Rather than representing a substratum o popular belie on which Christian tradition would eventually build, however, ancient religious practices and the attitudes towards art that accompanied them were both complex and contradictory.�� In the words o Peter Stewart: ...it would be somewhat harder to construct a modern ‘era o art’ i his [Belting’s] attention to the Roman world extended back beyond late antiquity. For while Roman responses to images were pre-modern – they may have been ‘irrational’ in many ways and they cert ainly do not correspond precisely to the modern Western concept o art – they nevertheless have too much in common with that persp ective to be confined in a kind o anthropological crucible.��
Ancient attitudes towards cult statues ranged rom scepticism to veneration, but contemporaries seem to have had little trouble reconciling cult and culture.�� It may seem petulant to ask more o a book that already provides so much, but in tracing the story o the Christian cult image, too much is taken or granted at the outset. At stake in these debates, beyond perennial problems o periodisation, are
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the originality and character not simply o the Renaissance, should one still care to use that term, but also, more critically, o early Christian art. Scholars working in the early modern period who t ake Belting’s book as the last word on the Middle Ages would do well to pay close attention to these debates, since they have important implications or the broader applicability o some o its bolder hypotheses, especially as they have been developed and extended in his subsequent work. At issue is how the Middle Ages are ramed, and the degree to which the period is seen as the crucible o modernity or its antithesis. Tese debates are not new, and Belting’s work constitutes part o a c ontinuous re-evaluation. His book participates in a return to a vision o the Middle Ages that is more instinctual or at least pre-discursive, but without the pejorative judgment that previously attached to condemnations o its alterity. More important, however, and perhaps ultimately more ruitul, has been Belting’s willingness, with a similar anthropological bent, to ignore what his adventuresome predecessor, Aby Warburg, characterised as the ‘Grenzpolizei ’, the disciplinary border guards. Even i, contra Belting, both the concept o art in the Middle Ages and art history as a whole appear to have a uture, there can be no doubt that Belting’s book will have played a transormative role in shaping their course.
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Notes
Articles, Letters to the Editor, Reports,Statements, Complaints, Haliax ����, p.���. For more on the ofen antagonistic dialogue between Judd and Krauss, see D. Raskin: ‘Te Shiny Illusionism o Krauss and Judd’, Art Journal (Spring ����), pp.�–��. Recounted in Newman, op. cit. (note �), p.���. R. Krauss: preace to R. Allen and M. urvey, eds.: CameraObscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honour o Annette Michelson, Amsterdam ����, pp.�–��. Siedell, op. cit. (note �), p.��. Krauss ����, op. cit. (note �), p.xi. On Bataille, see ‘No More Play’, in Krauss, op. cit . (note �), p.��: ‘Inorme denotes what alteration produces, the reduction o meaning or value, not by contradiction – which would be dialectical – by putreaction: the puncturing o the limits around the term, the reduction to the sameness o the cadaver – which is transgressive’. Te work o Bataille was to be explored more extensively in R. Krauss and Y.-A. Bois: Formless: A User’s Guide, New York ����. C. Owens: ‘Analysis Logical and Ideological’ (����), repr. in idem: BeyondRecognition: Representation, Power and Culture, Berkley ����, p.���. Krauss ����, op. cit. (note �), p.�. In a review o Krauss’s book and a subsequent introduction to Art Since 1900, Yve-Alain Bois has differentiated between a ‘morphological’conception o ormalism and a ‘structuralist’ one, identiying Krauss with the latter; see Y.-A. Bois: review o Te Originality o the Avant-Garde, Art Journal ��/� (����), pp.���–��; and idem, B. Buchloh, R. Krauss and H. Foster: Art Since 1900, London ����. A.E. Elsen and W.A. Haas: ‘On the Question o Originality: A Letter’, October �� (Spring ����), p.���. For a critique o Krauss’s notion o the ‘Paraliterary’, see J. Margolis: ‘Reinterpreting Interpretation’,Te Journal o Aesthetics and Criticism (Summer ����), pp.���–��. Owens ����, op. cit. (note ��), p.���. A. Partington: review oTe
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Originality o the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Te Oxord Art Journal �/� (����), p.��. C. Owens: ‘Te Discourse o Others: Feminists and Postmodernism’ (����), repr. in idem ����, op. cit . (note ��), pp.���–��. A. Chave: ‘Minimalismand Biography’, Te Art Bulletin �� (����), p.���. Ibid ., pp.���–��. Recounted in Newman, op. cit. (note �), p.��. R. Krauss: ‘Re-Presenting Picasso’, Art in America (December ����), pp.��–��. Apart rom ‘In the Name o Picasso’, this theme is taken up most explicitly in the bo ok’s introduction and the essays ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces’ and ‘Reading Jackson Pollock, Abstractly’. D. Carrier: Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: From Formalism to BeyondPostmodernism, Westport C ����, p.��. H. Wölfflin: Principles o Art History: Te Problem o the Development o Style in Later Art , transl. M.D. Hottinger, New York ����. Carrier, op. cit. (note ��), p.�. Siedell, op. cit. (note �), p.���. Bois, op. cit. (note ��), p.���. Ibid . Ibid . Introduction to Foster,op. cit. (note ��), p.xii. R. Krauss, Y.-A. Bois, H. Foster and B. Buchloh: ‘Roundtable: Te Predicament o Contemporary Art’, in idem, op. cit. (note ��), p.���. Krauss ����, op. cit. (note �), p.xiv.
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Hans Belting, Bild und Kult: eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst , ���� ������� ��������� Te author would like to thank Ruth Bieleldt, Caroline Bynum, FrankFehrenbach, Hildegard Elisabeth Keller and Peter Probst or commenting on previous versions o this review essay. Quotations in the text are taken rom the English translation by Edmund Jephcott: Likeness and Presence, Chicago ����.
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H. Belting: Das Echte Bild: Bildragen als Glaubensragen, Munich ����. Idem: review o O. Demus’s Byzantine Art and the West , Te Art Bulletin �� (����), pp.���–��. For some context, see U. Peters: ‘HistorischeAnthropologie und mittelalterliche Literatur:Schwerpünkte einer interdisziplinären Forschungsdiskussion’, in Festschrif Walter Haug und Burghart Wachinger , übingen ����, I, pp.��–��; and C. Kiening: ‘Anthropologische Zugänge zur mittelalterlichen Literatur: Konzepte, Ansätze, Perspektiven’, in H.-J. Schiewer, ed.: Forschungsberichte zur GermanistischenMediävistik, Bern ����, pp.��–���. Belting’s work surprisingly makes no reerence to A. Gell: Art and Agency: An Anthropological Teory , Oxord ����. J.-C. Schmitt: ‘La culture de l’imago’, Annales HSS (January–February ����), pp.�–��. See also idem: ‘Imago: entre image et imaginaire’, in A. Dutu and N. Dodille, eds.: Culture et politique, Paris ����, pp.��–��;idem: ‘Image: de l’image à l’imaginaire’, in J. Baschet and J.-C. Schmitt, eds.: L’image. Fonctions et usages des images dans l’Occident médiéval , Paris ����, pp.��–��; idem: ‘Plädoyer ür eine komparative Geschichte der religiösen Bilder’, Zeitsprünge: Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit � (����), pp.���–��; and idem: ‘La permanence des images et les changements de temporalité’, in . Durêne and A.-C. aylor, eds.: Cannibalismes disciplinaires. Quand l’histoire de l’art et l’anthropologie se rencontrent , Paris ����, pp.���–��. J. Gerchow, ed.: Ebenbilder: Kopien von Körpern, Modelle des Menschen, Ostfildern ����; and B. Latour and P. Weibel, eds.: Iconoclash, Karlsruhe ����, both with contributions by Belting. See also I. Bartl-Fliedl and C. Geissmar, eds.: Die Beredsamkeit des Leibes: zur Körpersprache in der Kunst , Salzburg ����. I. Almond: ‘How Not to Deconstruct a Dominican: Derrida on God and “Hypertruth”’, Journal o the American Academy o Religion �� (����), pp.���–��.
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Although it does not discuss Belting, see J. Elkins and D. Morgan, eds.: Re-Enchantment , London ����, or the broader context in which Belting’s book participates and, to a certain extent, helped create. Among the ew to note the connections is K.-O. Werckmeister: ‘Jutta Helds “Monument und Volk” und Hans Beltings “Bild und Kult”’, Georges-Bloch-Jahrbuch des KunstgeschichtlichenSeminars der Universität Zürich � (����), pp.�–��. D. Schöttke r, ed.: Walter Benjamin: Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischenReproduzierbarkeitund weitere Dokumente, Frankurt am Main ����, pp.��–��. Ibid., p.��. H. Beck and H. Bredekamp: exh. cat. Kunst um 1400 am Mittelrhein, Frankurt (Liebieghaus) ����–��; W. Kemp: ‘Fernbilder: Benjamin und die Kunstwissenschaf’, in B. Lindner, ed.: Walter Benjamin im Kontext , �nd enlarged ed., Königstein im aunus ����, pp.���–��, esp. pp.���–��; H. Bredekamp: ‘Der simulierte Benjamin:Mittelalterliche Anmerkungen zu s einer Aktualität’, in A. Berndt et al., eds.: Frankurter Schuleund Kunstgeschichte, Berlin ����, pp.���–��, translated as: ‘Te SimulatedBenjamin:Medieval Remarks on its Actuality’, Art in ranslation �/� (����), pp.���–���. H.-U. Gumbrecht: Production o Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanord ����. For strategies o mediation in medieval art, see, or example, C. Walker Bynum: ‘Seeing and Seeing Beyond: Te Mass o St. Gregory in the Fifeenth Century’, in A.-M. Bouché and J. Hamburger, eds.: Te Mind’s Eye: Art and Teology in the Middle Ages, Princeton ����, pp.���–��; and H.L. Kessler: ‘Real Absence: Early Medieval Art and the Metamorphosis o Vision’, in Morologie sociali e culturali in Europa ra tarda antichità e alto medioevo (Settimana internazionale di studi 45), Spoleto ����, pp.����– ���. H. Schlie: ‘Ein “Kunststück” Jan van Eycks in der Nacholge der mittelalterlichen Arteakt- und Kunsttheorie’, in C. Laude and G. Hess, eds.: Konzepte von Produk-
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tivität im Wandel vom Mittelalter in die Frühe Neuzeit , Berlin ����, pp.���–��. M. Caviness:‘Erweiterung des “Kunst”-Begriffs: Die Rezeption mittelalterlicher Werkeim Kontextnachimpressionistischer Bewegungen’, Oesterreichische Zeitschrif ür Kunst und Denkmalpflege �� (����), pp.���– ��, translated as ‘Broadening the Definitions o Art: Te Reception o Medieval Works in the Context o Post-Impressionist Movements’, in P.J. Gallacher and H. Damico, eds.: Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture, Albany ����, pp.���–��. See, most recently, . Buddensieg: ‘Die karolingischen Maler in ours und die Bauhausmaler in Weimar: Wilhelm Koehler und Paul Klee’, Zeitschrif ür Kunstgeschichte �� (����),pp.�–��. J. Nayrolles:L’invention de l’art roman à l’époque moderne (XVIIIe– XIXe siècles), Rennes ����; and C. Grewe: Painting the Sacred in the Age o Romanticism, Farnham and Burlington V ����. M.R. Olin: Forms o Representation in Alois Riegl’s Teory o Art , University Park PA ����; M. Gubser: ime’s Visible Surace: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and emporality in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, Detroit ����; N.H. Donahue,ed.: InvisibleCathedrals: Te Expressionist Art History o Wilhelm Worringer , University Park PA ����; J. rilling: ‘Medieval Art without Style? Plato’s Loophole and a Modern Detour’, Gesta �� (����), pp.��–��; and C. Öhlschläger: Abstraktionsdrang: Wilhelm Worringer und der Geist der Moderne, Paderborn ����. www.schaulager.org/en/index. php?pad=ausstellung/matthew_ barney/katalog. F. Hoffman et al ., eds.: Chris Burden, Newcastle upon yne ����. See, or example, D. Kuspit: ‘raditional Art History’s Complaint against the Linguistic Analysis o Visual Art’, Journal o Aesthetics and Art Criticism �� (����), pp.���–��. For Late Antiquity, see P. Brown: ‘Images as a Substitute or Writing’, in E. Chrysos and I. Wood, eds.: East and West. Modes o Communication: Proceedings o the
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First Plenary Conerence at Merida, Leiden ����, pp.��–��. See, or example,H.A. Oberman: Te Dawn o the Reormation: Essays in Late Medieval and Early Reormation Tought , Grand Rapids ����; and J. Simpson: ‘Diachronic History and the Shortcomings o Medieval Studies’, in G. McMullan and D. Matthews, eds.: Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England , Cambridge ����, pp.��–��. F. Jacobs: ‘Rethinking the Divide: Cult Images and the Cult o Images’, in J. Elkins and R. Williams, eds.: Renaissance Teory , New York ����, pp.��–���. For one example, see A. Speer: ‘Kunst ohne Kunst? Interartifizialität in Sugers Schrifen zur Abteikirche von Saint-Denis’,in S. Bürkle and U. Peters, eds.: Interartifizialität: Die Diskussion der Künste in der mittelalterlichenLiteratur (Zeitschrif ür deutsche Philologie: Sonderhef zum Band 128), Berlin ����, pp.���–��. o note but one example, the concept o a ‘visualistic turn’, employed in K. Sachs-Hombach, ed.: Bildtheorien: Anthropologische und kulturelle Grundlagen des Visualistic urn, Frankurt ����. ‘Mediality’ is another such term that lacks any clear meaning in English. H. Belting: ‘Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology’, Critical Inquiry �� (����), pp.���– ��. For the first instance o the term, see W.J. Mitchell: ‘Te Pictorial urn’, Art Forum ��/� (March ����), pp.��–��. D. Freedberg: ‘Holy Images and Other Images’, in S.C. Scott, ed.: Te Art o Interpreting , University Park PA ����, p.��. Freedberg continues: ‘I find the Byzantine theory o images to be both massangebend and paradigmatic, in the historical as well as in the psychological sense’. Idem: Te Power o Images: Studies in the History and Teory o Response, Chicago ����, pp.���–��. Idem, op. cit. (note ��), pp.��–��, esp. p.��. H. Belting: Florenz und Bagdad: eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks, Munich ����. W. J. . Mitchell: Picture Teory: Essays on Visual and Verbal
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Notes
Representation, Chicago ����, p.��. �� H. Belting: Szenarien der Moderne: Kunst und ihre offenen Grenzen, ed. P. Weibel, Berlin ����; idem and A. Buddensieg, eds.: Te Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums, Ostfildern ����. �� G. Boehm: ‘Die Wiederkehr der Bilder’, in idem, ed.: Was ist ein Bild? , Munich ����, pp.��–��. �� W. Sauerlände r: ‘Iconic urn? Eine Bitte um Ikonoklasmus’, in C. Maar and H. Burda, eds.: Iconic urn: Die neue Macht der Bilder , Cologne ����, pp.���–��; idem: ‘Kunstgeschichte und Bildwissenschaf’, in J. Früchtl and M. Moog-Grünewald, eds.: Ästhetik inmetaphysikkritischenZeiten: 100 Jahre Zeitschrif ür Ästhetik undAllgemeine Kunstwissenschaf (Sonderhef der Zeitschrif ür Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaf 8), übingen ����, pp.��–���. �� H. Bredekamp: ‘A Neglecte d radition? Art History as “Bildwissenschaf”’, CriticalInquiry �� (����), pp.���–��. �� H. Belting: Likeness and Presence: A History o the Image Beore the Era o Art , transl. E. Jephcott, Chicago ����, p.xxii. �� Ibid. �� H. Belting and D. Blume, eds.: Malerei und Stadtkultur in der Dantezeit: die Argumentation der Bilder , Munich ����, does not deal with narrative imagery rom the early Christian period to the High Middle Ages. �� P. Brown: Te Cult o the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity , Chicago ����. �� See Peter Schmidt’s report on the conerence at the Kunstgeschichtliches Institut der Universität Frankurt am Main, in collaboration with the Liebieghaus, Frankurt, ��nd to ��th June ����: ‘Sinn und Un-Sinn des Kultbildes: Die Intellektualisierung und die Mystifizierung mittelalterlicher Kunst’,Kunstchronik ��/�–�� (����),pp.���–��. �� B. Brenk: Te Apse, the Image and the Icon: An Historical Perspective o the Apse as a Space or Images, Wiesbaden ����; and H. Belting: ‘Eine Privatkapelle im rühmittelalterlichen Rom’,
Dumbarton Oaks Papers �� (����), pp.��–��. �� .S.Scheer: Die Gottheit und ihr Bild: Untersuchungen zur Funktion griechischer Kultbilder in Religion und Politik, Munich ����. �� P. Stewart : ‘Gell’s Idols and Roman Cult’, in R. Osbourne and J. anner, eds.: Art’s Agency and Art History , Oxord ����, pp.���–��, esp. pp.���–��. �� G. Didi-Huber man: “‘Imaginum pictura . . . in totum exoleuit”: Début de l’histoire de l’art et fin de l’époque de l’image’, Critique ��� (����), pp.���–��; D. Steiner: Images in Mind: Statues in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature and Tought , Princeton ����; P. Stewart: Statues in Roman Society: Representation and Response, Oxord ����, pp.���–���; and J. Mylonopoulos, ed.: DivineImages and Human Imaginations in Ancient Greece and Rome, Leiden ����.
Bibliographical Essays In this sect ion, the term ‘edition’ is taken to mean the first publication and any subsequent version that incorporates substantial modifications or additions to the original. In most cases these are signalled by the publisher, although there is no agreed definition o what constitutes a new edition. Reprinted or reissued volumes are not considered new editions here.
����� ���� (����–����) ���������
É
mile Mâle was a medievalist specialising in French Gothic art and architecture. He was a pioneering figure in the iconographic approach to art history – the study o the sources and meaning o pictorial elements, as opposed to pictorial orm – and he coined the term ‘iconography’ in ����. From ���� he taught literature at secondary schools, but began lecturing on art-historical subjects in ����. His doctoral thesis, L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France, was finished in ���� and published in the same year. He began teaching Christian medieval archaeology at the Sorbonne in ���� and was appointed to a new chair in medieval art there in ����. Mâle continued to research and publish on the subject o French medieval art, and was appointed honorary director o the École Française in Rome in ����, where he stayed until ����. Following the War he took up the position o curator at the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris.
����������� ������� L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France. Ét ude sur l’iconographie du moyen âge et sur ses sources d’inspiration
First published: ���� Originallanguage: French
Editions to date in original language: en First translation: ����, German Other languages: English, Spanish L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France. Etude sur l’iconographie du moyen âge et sur ses sources d’inspiration, was first published in Paris by Ernest Leroux in ����. Te second ‘revised and corrected’ edition was published by Armand Colin in Paris in ����, and a third in ����, ‘revised and augmented’. It was eventually to orm one o the volumes o a series o our works covering French medieval art, all published by Armand Colin, comprising L’Art religieux de la fin du Moyen Âge en France (����); L’Art religieux au XIIe siècle en France (����); and L’Art religieux après le Concile de rente: Étude sur l’iconographie de la fin du XVIe siècle, du XVIIe, du XVIIIe siècle, Italie, France, Espagne, Flanders (����). Further French editions o L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France were published in: ���� (ourth edition), ���� (fifh edition), ����, (sixth edition), ���� (seventh edition), ���� (eighth edition) ���� (ninth edition). All subsequent printings reproduce the text o the ninth edition, the first to appear afer Mâle’s death. It was reprinted by Armand Colin in ����, ����, ����, ����, ����, ���� and ����. A new edition appeared in ����, again reproducing the text o the ninth edition.
