DEPTDIRECTORY
Faculty » Conrad Rudolph
"The Empress Theodora"
Church of San Vitale, 526-548 A.D.
Ravenna Italy
Using the route and information presented in the twelfth-century Pilgrim's Guide of the Codex Calixtinus as his basis, Professor Rudolph undertook the grueling medieval pilgrimage on foot--a journey of a thousand miles and two and a half months--from Le Puy in south-central France to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, May to July, 1996.
Professor
Office: 223 Arts Building
Phone: (951) 827-4240
E-mail: conrad.rudolph@ucr.edu
Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles
Areas of specialization: Medieval Art History with special interests in such topics as the social theory of medieval art, the ideological use of art, monasticism and art, the origin of Gothis art, and the art and social change.
Conrad Rudolph is Professor of Medieval Art History. He has special interests in such topics as the social theory of medieval art, the ideological use of art, monasticism and art, the origin of Gothic art, and art and social change. He has held Guggenheim, J. Paul Getty, and Mellon fellowships, as well as having received a Millard Meiss Publication Fund Grant of the College Art Association and a Kress Foundation Grant.
Books:
Edited Books:
A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe , Blackwell Companions to Art History (Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 2005) (a collection of thirty original essays from leading scholars in the field, each historiographically analyzing one of a wide range of subjects in the development of Romanesque and Gothic art history; this includes my introductory essay, "A Sense of Loss: An Overview of the Historiography of Romanesque and Gothic Art").
Articles:
In press: "Art and Architecture: Cistercian," The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, Oxford, forthcoming 2008) (9 typescript pages).
"The Wu Family Shrines," Journal of Asian Culture 4 (1980) 21-47.
Invited:
"Cosmic Politics: Hugh of St Victor's The Mystic Ark and the Struggle over Elite Education in the Twelfth Century," The National Gallery of Art; Washington, DC; two-day seminar, December 13-14, 2008.
The "Things of Greater Importance": Bernard of Clairvaux's Apologia and the Medieval Attitude toward Art
Among my interests are the questions of how art was affected by society, how it affected society in turn, and how it was perceived by society. Some basic work along these lines is laid out in The "Things of Greater Importance": Bernard of Clairvaux's Apologia and the Medieval Attitude toward Art (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990) in which I discuss a number of the more pressing artistic issues affecting frontline art of the early twelfth century as presented through Bernard's Apologia, the central document in the greatest artistic controversy to occur in the West prior to the Reformation and the most important source that we have for a social-theoretical understanding of medieval art. It was no coincidence that this monastic treatise should have taken up artistic issues, or that it should have been written at precisely this time. The early twelfth century was a time of explosive growth in the areas of monumental sculpture, painting, and architecture; it was the great period of pilgrimage art, High Romanesque, and the origins of Gothic. It was in connection with these developments, and the economic and social expansion that fueled them, that Bernard raised his criticisms of art (the "things of greater importance"), describing them as the most significant problem facing contemporary monasticism, which was at that time the intellectual and artistic fountainhead of Europe.
As presented in the study--which is securely anchored in both the monastic literary tradition and contemporary political, social, and economic concerns--the discussion of Bernard's "things of greater importance" follows a sequence from the economic base of monastic art production to the artistic means by which this was carried out, to the reception of excessive art on the part of the general public, to external social objections, and finally to the internal spiritual objections of monasticism. Central to this social theory of medieval art is the concept of the justification of art, the limits of acceptable art, and the question of just what actually constituted excessive art. This study shows that art, the absence of art, or the degree of art in the Middle Ages should no longer be seen simply as the result of the ability to acquire or the desire to avoid art. This book comprises the most thorough study available of the theoretical basis of medieval art as it actually functioned in society; and its implications for the art of both the Romanesque and Gothic periods, whose transition Bernard's life spans, are significant.
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Artistic Change at St-Denis: Abbot Suger's Program and the Early Twelfth-Century Controversy over Art
In Artistic Change at St-Denis: Abbot Suger's Program and the Early Twelfth-Century Controversy over Art (Princeton University Press, 1990), I test the practicality of my earlier study, The "Things of Greater Importance." In applying the issues of the early twelfth-century controversy over art to Suger's program, it has become clear that the situation at Saint-Denis was more complex than previously thought. For example, rather than being the artistic expression of centuries-old Pseudo-Dionysian light mysticism, as Erwin Panofsky and Otto von Simson believed, it can be shown that the artistic change initiated at Saint-Denis was a middle-ground reaction to the current controversy over art, especially to the criticism that art acted as a spiritual distraction to the monk. Far from being the product of the personal idiosyncrasies of Suger, as is often said, the well-known obscurity of the art of Saint-Denis was an intentional obscurity whose purpose was to provide an art so complex that it could be used as a justification of monastic art in its claim to function on the same level as scriptural study, which was unquestioned as a legitimate monastic pursuit. It was in this sense that Suger wrote that his art was "accessible only to the litterati"--and not to the visiting illiterate pilgrim--previous scholarship not realizing that, in the vocabulary of early twelfth-century monasticism, litteratus is a technical term referring to the literate choir monk. At the same time, however, I also show that Suger's claim can be fully understood only with recognition of the inherent contradiction that these same artworks were in fact fully accessible visually, if not intellectually, to the visiting illiterate lay pilgrim as well--a contradiction of which Suger was completely aware.
Suger himself, however, was unable to formulate the intellectual/spiritual basis of either such ideas or their projection in art, and so he had to get someone who could. In this study, I show that Hugh of Saint Victor, a canon of the renowned Parisian collegial house of Saint Victor and the leading living theologian of Europe, acted as a principal advisor to Suger on major intellectual/spiritual and iconographic aspects of the program. Indeed, it is only through Hugh's writings that the previously indecipherable tympanum of the west central portal of Saint-Denis--the centerpiece of perhaps the most pivotal monument of medieval art--can begin to be deciphered.
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Violence and Daily Life: Reading , Art, and Polemics in the Cîteaux Moralia in Job
Violence and Daily Life: Reading , Art, and Polemics in the Cîteaux Moralia in Job (Princeton University Press, 1997) focuses on the Cîteaux Moralia, one of the best known but least understood illuminated manuscripts of the Romanesque period. It is so well-known because of its striking illuminations of violence and daily life, and is poorly understood because these illuminations have been taken largely at face value. This lack of understanding has come about because of an unawareness on the art-theoretical level of exactly how spirituality and politics operate in the artistic process in this particular manuscript, and how this specific form of spirituality legitimized a very intimate and at first glance undisciplined attitude on the part of the artist toward his subject.
The Cîteaux Moralia is illustrated copy of one of the most widespread and influential texts of medieval monastic culture, Gregory the Great's Moralia in Job. It has been used by such scholars as Meyer Schapiro as evidence for the claim that the monstrous imagery of the Middle Ages was an imagery of "unbridled, often irrational fantasy," entirely independent of the text and of any specific meaning. Unbridled and irrational its images may be. But they are not independent of either the text or specific meaning. The brilliance of these illuminations and an undercurrent of thematic consistency that may be detected in them cry out from hiding, as it were, that, like an obscure event from Scripture, there is potentially another level of meaning beyond what has so far met the eyes of modern viewers. The scenes of seemingly gratuitous violence and seemingly straightforward daily life are, in fact, the product of Gregory's demand that one "become" what one reads. Once the imagery of the Cîteaux Moralia is analyzed with regard to medieval theories of lectio divina, meditatio, and progressing levels of spiritual advancement, its theoretical framework becomes clear--as does its ultimate spiritual/political failure in the context of twelfth-century monastic polemics and artistic culture. No longer viewed as "irrational" and devoid of specific meaning, this iconographically virtually unique manuscript reveals, like a prism, a great deal about a number of art historical questions common to many other medieval artworks, shedding its refracted light on such issues as the supposed direct observation of nature for its own sake, the nature of monstrous and violent imagery, the seemingly ornamental character of some non-narrative imagery, the intrusion of the secular upon the sacred, and, inevitably, the role of the artist in all this.
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Pilgrimage to The End of the World: The Road to Santiago de Compostela
In an application outside the university of my interests in medieval culture, in the spring and summer of 1996 I undertook the grueling medieval pilgrimage on foot from Le Puy in south-central France to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain--and, as was done in the Middle Ages, three days beyond to Finisterre, The End of the World-- using the route and information presented in the twelfth-century Pilgrim's Guide of the Codex Calixtinus as my basis, a journey of two and a half months and a thousand miles. Pilgrimage to the End of the World: The Road to Santiago de Compostela, some reflections on this journey and on medieval pilgrimage in general, has been written up for the educated public and has been the impetus to the creation by the Press of an unusual new series, currently entitled Culture Trails.
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First, I Find the Center Point": Reading the Text of Hugh of Saint Victor's The Mystic Ark
In the medieval sources, works of art are rarely referred to, let alone described in any detail. When they are mentioned, it is seldom with more than a word or phrase, at the most a sentence. Hugh of Saint Victor's The Mystic Ark is a forty-two page description of what seems to be the most complex single work of art of the entire Middle Ages, a fundamentally political painting also known as The Mystic Ark, making both the text and the painting among the most unusual sources we have for an understanding of medieval artistic culture and its polemical context.
The Mystic Ark is known to have arisen from a series of brilliant lectures given by Hugh--considered to be the leading theologian of Europe during his life--sometime from 1125 to early 1130 at Saint Victor, a house of Augustinian canons in Paris whose school was a predecessor of the University of Paris. Because of the immense difficulty of its text, The Mystic Ark has been almost completely ignored by art historians and often misunderstood by other scholars. Generally speaking, it has been seen as a "step-by-step" set of instructions that were rarely or even never used to create an actual painting, the text being meant to be read strictly as a work of ekphrasis (the verbal evocation of an imaginary work of art) or as a memory aid in order to conjure up a purely mental image.
"First, I Find the Center Point": Reading the Text of Hugh of Saint Victor's The Mystic Ark (American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 2004) corrects this neglect and misunderstanding through a study of the nature of the text of The Mystic Ark as a necessary first step in a larger study. (Work is already well underway on a book-length project, The Mystic Ark: Hugh of Saint Victor and the Multiplication and Systematization of Imagery in the Twelfth Century, in which I analyze the context and meaning of the painting of The Mystic Ark and demonstrate how it formed a crucial stage in the conceptual development of the Gothic portal, perhaps the most significant fully indigenous expression of Northern European, public figural art of the Middle Ages.)
My approach to the problem in Center Point is three pronged. First, through close study of the text, I show that The Mystic Ark is not a work of literature properly speaking but a reportatio (something similar to class notes) by one of Hugh's students, although Hugh himself very much remains its author. Recognition of this previously unrecognized aspect goes a long way in clarifying many difficulties of the text that previous authors were at pains to explain. Second, I refute a large and impossibly complex body of opinions that has arisen to explain the relation between the painting of The Mystic Ark, the different recensions of The Mystic Ark, and The Moral Ark (a related treatise by Hugh). In place of those tortuous arguments, I provide simple explanations for these relationships through analysis of the textual tradition and historical context of The Mystic Ark . And third, having established The Mystic Ark as a reportatio and explained the relation of the painting and the various texts, I address the nature and immediate function of the text of The Mystic Ark, clearly establishing that a painting of The Mystic Ark originally existed at Saint Victor, probably in the form of a wall painting, an image I believe was painted by Hugh himself. I show that, although the text of The Mystic Ark was not an actual "step-by-step" set of instructions, its purpose was to enable scholars outside of Saint Victor to undertake similar lectures and discussions based upon a reconstruction of the painting. Since the major themes of the painting were the subjects of contemporary controversies such as the history of salvation, creation, neoplatonism, and the place of science in the education of society's intellectual elite, my conclusions demonstrate that The Mystic Ark--of which enough manuscript copies survive to indicate that it was the medieval equivalent of a best seller--served as a major and novel statement in the current intellectual controversies of the mid-twelfth century, a time of great intellectual and cultural change.
In the end, Center Point clarifies generations of confusion surrounding The Mystic Ark . It reveals the striking role that a complex image could play in the spiritual and intellectual controversies of the day. And it sets the stage for my future book on this amazingly popular image and text that, together, form one of the most important sources we have for medieval art in its social context.
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A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe
A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe is a collection of thirty originally commissioned essays from leading scholars in the field. Each essay historiographically analyzes one of a wide range of subjects in the development of Romanesque and Gothic art history. This includes my introductory essay, "A Sense of Loss: An Overview of the Historiography of Romanesque and Gothic Art."
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"Communal Identity and the Earliest Christian Legislation on Art: Canon 36 of the Synod of Elvira," Perspectives for an Architecture of Solitude: Essays on Cistercians, Art and Architecture in Honour of Peter Fergusson, ed. Terryl Kinder, 1-7.
This short Festschrift piece takes up Canon Thirty-six of the Synod of Elvira (c. 306), the first official statement on art by the Christian Church and so a historical document of special interest in the history of Early Christian and medieval art. Rather than read the canon as a simple prohibition against the use of Christian art as idolatrous as has traditionally been done, I conclude that its purpose was to counter a disturbing culture of apostasy and loss of communal identity that had arisen in the Spanish Church through the strong integration of the Christian subculture within the dominant pagan culture (the result of a peaceful period of social integration followed by an unusually bloody persecution), and show how the canon tacitly marks a significant point of transition in the development of a distinctly Christian artistic culture.
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"Monastic Aesthetics," in Michelle P. Brown, A History of Christian Art (Lion Hudson, Oxford, forthcoming 2006).
The aesthetics of the visual arts within monasticism in the Middle Ages was far from monolithic. Using the writings of Suger of Saint-Denis and Bernard of Clairvaux as my primary vehicles, this short article gives a brief overview of some of the issues involved in monastic aesthetics, such as materialism, monastic social entanglement, the Cult of the Dead and the Cult of Relics, the pilgrimage and the new money economy, the localization of the holy, the necessity of pilgrimage art, and monasticism's "crisis of prosperity." I take up Bernard's critique of the monastic investment in art, the sensory saturation of the holy place (particularly through excess in material and craftsmanship), the manipulation through art of the equation between excessive art and holiness in the popular conception, expenditure on art rather than on the care of the poor, and art as a spiritual distraction to the monk. And I briefly discuss Cistercian artistic aestheticism, the aesthetics of excess, the claim that art could act as a spiritual aid similar to scriptural study, and the role that all of this had in the shaping of what is known to us as Romanesque and Gothic art.
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"A Sense of Loss: An Overview of the Historiography of Romanesque and Gothic Art," A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Blackwell, Oxford, 2006) 1-43.
"A Sense of Loss" is an overview of the historiography of Romanesque and Gothic art beginning with the initial sense of loss medieval culture with the great destruction wrought by the Reformation, and continuing through to vast changes of the post-World War II period. Because the view of medieval art has been so intimately related to classicism, this overview also takes up the "pre-history" of medieval art historiography in the early Greek and Roman historians of art, as well as the early modern writers of the Renaissance.
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"La resistenza all'arte nell'Occidente," Arti e storia nel Medioevo, ed. Enrico Castelnuovo and Giuseppe Sergi, 4 vol. (Giulio Einaudi Editore, Turin, 2002-2004) v.3, p. 49-84 (English version of my piece, "Resistance to Art in the West," available upon request).
In this survey of the leading primary sources on the medieval attitude toward art, I argue that resistance to art in the West from the Early Christian period up to around 1200 was largely posed on social or intellectual/spiritual grounds. Within certain limits, it was primarily only in the Early Christian period, a time when the Eastern and Western cultural spheres were more closely united than would later be the case, that theological concerns seem to have played any significant role in what might be called the Western cultural sphere. The rare iconoclasts and heretics of later times were essentially aberrations.
Beyond this, normative or even luxurious art was rarely an issue (by "luxurious art" I mean that art which goes beyond the common, minimal expectations in material and craftsmanship of a particular social or religious group within a particular region at a particular time). Far more important to resistance to art in the West were the social and intellectual/spiritual issues raised by the mainstream of culture, especially monastic culture, following a tradition that gradually became a venerable one--and one that had to be reckoned with. Typically, this was directed at excessive art (by "excessive art" I mean that art which exceeds the norm of luxurious art of a particular social or religious group in the emphasis put on material, craftsmanship, size, and quantity, as well as in type of subject matter). Ultimately, art was not something that was either simply accepted or rejected: its use and limits could vary from social group to social group (the artwork's public), it was subject to certain limits within those social groups, and it had to be justified when it went beyond those limits. And in this process, decisions were primarily guided not by some near-doctrine, but by the traditions that pertained to the group in question.
Far from only limiting art in the narrow sense, resistance to art worked in a dialectical manner, contributing to an artistic culture that was vibrant, acting as one of its most stimulating influences--even, at times, as a conscience that kept it focused. Though often changing in emphasis from period to period, both the justifications of art and the issues raised in resistance to it were constants. Indeed, not only could they be constants, but--like everything else--they could be manipulated.
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Isaac Laughing : Caravaggio, Non-traditional Imagery, and Traditional Identification," co-written with the Baroque scholar Steven Ostrow, Art History 24 (2001) 646-681.
In "Isaac Laughing : Caravaggio, Non-traditional Imagery, and Traditional Identification," I have stepped outside of the Middle Ages to collaborate with my departmental colleague, Steven Ostrow, on a complex reinterpretation of a very important and unusual painting by the famous seventeenth-century artist, Caravaggio. Rather than accept traditional interpretations of this enigmatic painting as John the Baptist or some idyllic shepherd, we argue that the image depicts the Sacrifice of Isaac, with Isaac joyfully embracing his savior in the form of the ram that God sent to be offered in his place, rising up from the altar on which he was to be sacrificed by his father, Abraham, whose place is taken by the viewer in one of the most creative object-viewer dynamics of the early modern period.
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In the Beginning: Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe in the Twelfth Century," Art History 22 (1999) 3-55.
Taking up the role of artistic argumentation in the process of intellectual consensus, "In the Beginning: Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe in the Twelfth Century" investigates the phenomenal explosion of interest in creation theory in the twelfth century, an interest that was accompanied by an equally phenomenal increase in creation imagery of almost 900% over the previous century. Because of the absolute fundamentality of the concept of creation, any given culture's view of creation is crucial to that culture's intellectual self-identity, and, as such, can act as a microcosm of sorts of its essential character, whether creation is looked at in its orthodox aspect or, even better, as a point of contention, as in the United States even today. This study shows how seemingly minor changes in creation imagery--which is commonly ignored as the literal illustration of the biblical text it accompanies and nothing more--instead reveal that these illustrations were often active factors in the process of forming elite opinion on one of the major subjects in the education of medieval society's intellectual leaders as a prelude to conditioning public opinion on a broader, lower level.
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"Building-Miracles as Artistic Justification in the Early and Mid-Twelfth Century," Radical Art History: Internationale Anthologie, Subject: O.K. Werckmeister, ed. Wolfgang Kersten (Zip Verlag, Zurich, 1997) 398-410 (Festschrift for Karl Werckmeister).
"Building-Miracles as Artistic Justification in the Early and Mid-Twelfth Century" is an original analysis of one of the most widely misunderstood topoi of the art historical primary literature. In it, I analyze the miraculous stories of building that have traditionally been treated as little more than pious legends, demonstrating how these accounts typically follow very precise literary topoi of authoritative origin and how their messages were expressed not through claimed historical veracity, but rather through claimed association with venerable and widely recognized precedent. While acting as pious tales on the popular level, these miracle stories acted on the polemical level to justify architectural undertakings that, for one reason or another, the medieval author felt it necessary to defend, typically being related to significant social, liturgical, and economic factors, including questions of excess, the introduction of foreign artistic styles, changing power structures, and the re-urbanization of Western Europe.
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"Bernard of Clairvaux's Apologia as a Description of Cluny and the Controversy Over Monastic Art," Gesta 27 (1988) 125-132.
The current conception of the art of the abbey of Cluny and of what is generally known as the Cluniac Order has been formed to an inordinate degree on the basis of one historical document, Bernard of Clairvaux's Apologia ad Guillelmum. Indeed, many scholars have seen the treatise's passage on art (Apol. 28-29) as a description of art as it existed at Cluny at the time of the writing of the Apologia (probably 1125). In confronting the question, this article briefly takes up a number of issues, including the belief that the Apologia was specifically addressed to the abbey of Cluny , that Bernard was either strongly repulsed by or strongly attracted to art, and that Apol. 29 is a description of actual cloister sculpture, most notably that of the cloister of Pons at Cluny . Instead, the passage which has been seen as a description of the cloister of Pons is explained as a critique of certain elements of art as a spiritual distraction--the implication being that a reformulation of our artistic conception of Cluny is long overdue, and that the criticism of art contained in the Apologia played a larger role than that of merely acting as a censure of artworks as they existed at Cluny.
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"The 'Principal Founders' and the Early Artistic Legislation of Cîteaux," Studies in Cistercian Art and Architecture 3, Cistercian Studies Series 89 (Kalamazoo 1987) 1-45.
It has been said that the early Cistercians were not as distinctive as their successors had wished them to be. And at least as far as art was concerned, this was very much the case in the earliest years. In fact, Cîteaux may even have been more lax in this regard than a number of the other new ascetic movements such as that of Odo of Tournai or the Carthusians. Yet, by 1125 William of Malmesbury could point to the artistic asceticism of the Cistercians as one of their most distinguishing features. The legal basis of this artistic asceticism consisted of statutes 10, 20, and 80. Far from being the expression of explicit ideals of the primitive founders of Cîteaux, we know that statutes 10 and 20 were not a part of the original principles upon which the Order was established in 1098 under Robert or of those codified under Alberic before 1109, and that statute 80 was for some reason not a part of this first body of artistic legislation.
While their exact dating is uncertain, statutes 10 and 20 were legislated sometime from 1115 to 1119. All in all, they approach the subject of art in the monastery in a rather comprehensive manner: statute 10 having covered liturgical art, statute 20 regulates monumental sculpture and painting; both apply to inside as well as outside the church. The ideal was the virtual elimination of all excessive vestments, gold, silver, jewels, sculpture, and painting from the monastery. Yet, as activist reformers following a minimal line, the Cistercians of c.1119 were careful to make plain their orthodoxy in their desire to define, legislate, and achieve the minimum. By limiting the use of luxurious materials, color, and art forms the Cistercians of c.1119 attempted to institutionalize a particularly austere interpretation of simplicity, the avoidance of distraction, and voluntary poverty as they relate to art, and in so doing to establish a specific form of regular life with a specific relation to society. There is no reason to doubt that the degree of voluntary poverty as practiced at Cîteaux was anything other than extreme, but modest material excess in regard to divine worship--especially when coupled with architecture of a humble nature--could easily be divorced from the principle of a voluntary, individual poverty. While "the institutes of the Cistercian monks who came from Molesme" were rigorous but dealt with traditional themes as regards monastic legislation, those of simply "the Cistercians" which took up the subject of art were very non-traditional statutes indeed. The evidence suggests that not only was this artistic legislation not seen as desirable under the undiluted first generation, but that it brought about the removal of existing artworks and that it may even have been resisted to a degree. But these statutes of which Bernard was the moral author were accepted, and were seen as the culmination of the foundation of the Cistercian community. This was not for reasons of simplicity, the avoidance of distraction, and voluntary poverty alone, but as EP 17 implies also because of their role in the disengagement and prevention of social entanglement. In social terms, statute 10 flatly rejected the aesthetics of the economic basis of traditional monasticism, the opus Dei; statute 20 the use of art to encourage a pilgrimage economy. This is why one of the most venerable of all Cistercian documents devoted so much attention to the enactment of statutes 10 and 20. This is why capitula 25 and 26 conclude the Capitula. This is why Bernard is described as one of the principal founders of the Cistercian community. And this is why the Exordium Parvum, following a continuous theme, culminates with the arrival of Bernard and the institution of his restrictive art legislation as the amplification and completion of the Cistercian way of life. The enactment and enforcement of statutes 10 and 20 amounted to no less than an artistic overturn at Cîteaux, and its account in Exordium Parvum 17 a proto-Apologia.
Whereas statutes 10 and 20 addressed themselves to broad social and economic questions, questions which had profound implications for the Order, statute 80 seems to have been legislated in response to a very particular situation probably around the years 1149-1150. Composed of two clauses which are distinct in their application but related in their concern over excessive color and imagery, the first clause legislates artistic asceticism in the area of the illuminated manuscript--something which seems to have been left up to individual abbatial interpretation of statute 20 previously--and so instituted the final segment of a comprehensive, restrictive art policy begun with statutes 10 and 20. Far from introducing any new element into the contemporary Cistercian policy toward art, the second clause in its restrictions concerning windows amounts to no more than the first of a long succession of reiterative statutes whose primary purpose was to enforce the artistic ideals of the second generation--and this even before the death of Bernard. Just as Bernard's policy of expansion was about to be legislatively reversed in the last months of his life, so on a more popular level were the tenets of the artistic overturn of this principal founder being openly defied. With wealth and power also came the stultification of spontaneous asceticism, especially artistic asceticism, something so many of the charismatic founders of the new ascetic orders had hoped to avoid by not writing down their customs, and something whose form of life the second generation had hoped to institutionalize in part by statutes 10 and 20. Thus it seems that the best explanation for the late date of stat 80 is that flagrant examples of excessive artworks demanded a restatement of the tenets of the early artistic asceticism, the asceticism of an earlier generation; this in turn suggested specific restrictions based on the distractive potential of color and imagery; the great amount of building in stone was the impetus, but the subject itself provided the opportunity to explicitly restrict the long neglected area of manuscript illumination, an area whose importance is indicated by the priority it is given over stained glass; finally, Bernard's failing health and the rumblings of change forced the issue. This legalistic circumvention and even open defiance speak eloquently to us of the fact that the views of Bernard were by no means necessarily those of the entire Order, and that the applied artistic asceticism of the second generation was slipping. Indeed, if the great distinction of the Cistercians in William of Malmesbury's view was in part the appearance of overcoming the perpetua lex of inevitable decline through the promise of unchanging artistic asceticism legislated by the statutes of 1115-1119, and if the first clause of statute 80 marked the completion of that policy in 1149-1150, it was the compromise legislation of the second clause that signaled the decline of the artistic ideals of the second generation in practice and confirmed the perpetua lex of William--as the allowance of gold and silver plated crucifixes four years after the death of Bernard shows.
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"The Scholarship on Bernard of Clairvaux's Apologia," Cîteaux: Commentarii Cistercienses 40 (1989) 69-111.
The essential problem for the study of the Apologia has been that scholars have felt it does not specifically name one monastery or monastic order as a subject of the criticisms contained in it. Although Bernard quite clearly and repeatedly addressed his admonitions to William of Saint-Thierry's "order," scholars have known that William was a friend of Bernard and therefore have believed that this address must have been a front for an indirect attack upon someone else. At the same time they have assumed that the Apologia was aimed at Cluny in particular. Undoubtedly from the earliest times a major factor in this conception has been the similarity of Bernard's Letter 1 and the Apologia. Yet crucial distinctions between the two have not been noticed. These are that Bernard never hesitated to repeatedly mention Cluny by name in Letter 1, and that there is no criticism of the art of Cluny in the same letter. The problem of clarity of address was solved by prefixing to the Apologia, on inconclusive evidence, a certain letter of Bernard's. This letter, in recounting an earlier one of William's, did mention the Cluniacs. However, when the text proper was quoted either extensively or without the aid of the spurious preface, later scholars felt that it was necessary to interpolate the word "Cluniac," as Bernard did not sufficiently use that word to accommodate their conception of the treatise. As a result, attention focused on Cluny as the major, or even sole, recipient of the Apologia.
Many scholars have thought that if it were Cluny that Bernard had complained about in his treatise, it must also be Cluny that he had described in his chapters on art. Therefore the Apologia was substituted for historical evidence in their reconstruction of the art program of that abbey. The use of Bernard's denunciation of the worst aspects of excessive art as a catalogue of the artworks as they were believed to have existed at Cluny in 1125 has led to an image of Cluny as bent on a program of excessive art. This image was compounded by a somewhat misleading comparison with Cîteaux when Cîteaux was at its financially most impoverished level. Such a polarization of the two most visible representatives of contemporary monasticism has contributed to a rather limited understanding of the monastic controversy in the early twelfth century. The inflexibility of this view has also had as a consequence the impression that excessive ornamentation was somehow distinctively Cluniac, and to be consistently found throughout the Cluniac Congregation.
As to an analysis of what Bernard actually said about art, scholars have tended to concentrate their attention on two main aspects of Apologia 28-29: Bernard's censure of art as a spiritual distraction and his recognition of the utility of a secular religious art. The first point has, in the most thorough work, received a certain amount of recognition. But although Bernard's comments on secular religious art were only made in passing, they have been dealt with by some as a major tenet of the Apologia. In short, these authors have fixed on to what may be termed the artistically positive aspects of the Apologia, rather than on to the more prominent negative criticisms of art.
The same inclination is seen in efforts to explain the impetus behind Apologia 28-29. The premium set on medieval religious art by nineteenth-century Church enthusiasts compelled them to denounce Bernard's criticism of art as personally motivated, rather than on monastic or social grounds. The approaches to Bernard's personal attitude toward art have been varied and contradictory, with some authors suggesting that Bernard's rejection of art indicated a revulsion, and to others a very strong attraction. In the end, this has detracted from seeing any more historically or politically based impetus to Bernard's actions, which scholarship has only just begun to look at. Possibly because of the emphasis on personal stimulus, no direct connection has been made between the Apologia and the discontinuation of heavily ornamented manuscripts within the Cistercian Order. In any event, Bernard's relation to Cistercian art and legislation on art has not been put into proper perspective. While a very few authors have noted similarities between his views and those of earlier Church fathers, Bernard's position within a non-iconoclastic movement against religious art in his own time has been largely neglected.
Ultimately, there has been no thorough analysis of the Apologia with the exception of Vacandard's ground breaking effort. The tendency has been to isolate various passages of Apologia 28-29, rather than to coherently analyze the whole, especially in relation to the rest of the Apologia, Bernard's other writings, the artistic evidence of Cluny and Cîteaux, and the political conditions of both Cîteaux and monasticism in general. The literature has established a rather inflexible and restricted view of the Apologia. But at the same time, questions have at least been raised on most major issues which, when developed, will lead to a more significant understanding of the part played by Bernard's treatise in the controversy over monastic art in the twelfth century.
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"Heterodoxy and the Twelve Great Feasts of the Eastern Church," Comitatus 12 (1981) 13-30.
Historians have never properly dealt with the Twelve Great Feasts (the Dodekaortion) of the Eastern Orthodox Church. While some feasts have received much attention, others have been almost totally ignored, making an understanding of these feasts as a group difficult. More importantly, scholars have largely disregarded the historical causes behind the feasts' existence. When the feasts are studied as a group, it becomes clear that their original purpose was not to commemorate events in Christ's life, as has been claimed (Dix), but rather to put forth theological and ultimately political propositions in an accessible and convincing form.
The early Church observed only three feasts as independent celebrations (what I call the Core Group: the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and Pentecost). It was not until centuries later, after the Council of Constantinople, that the other feasts were observed throughout the East. These post-Nicene feasts followed a similar pattern of institution for the most part. A feast usually originated at one specific Church as the popular manifestation of opposition to a particular heresy or schismatic doctrine. Observance of the feasts was at first strictly local. The rest of the Eastern Church usually adopted them for the same reasons that the local Churches had; but, occasionally, because of the Orthodox character of the feasts, their doctrinal potential was redirected toward other controversies.
Like so much of Christian theology, whose original simplicity became more and more complicated, the post-Nicene feasts were formed in reaction to the various heresies. The Core Group corresponds to the early stage of Christian theology, commemorating from the beginning the essential tenets of salvation. The Cyrillian Group (the Raising of Lazarus, Palm Sunday, and the Ascension) comprises the first feasts formed in conscious reaction to a heresy--Arianism. Before Cyril, there were no universal feasts apart from the Core Group; with him, the feast as an anti-heretical device became established. The Epiphany and the Nativity were likewise directed against Arianism, but they derived from pre-existing feasts of local significance that probably had no original connection with heresy. The Marian Group (the Presentation, the Dormition, and the Annunciation) arose in opposition to the next great threat to Orthodoxy, Nestorianism. In this group, the first documentary evidence of institution by imperial decree appears, testimony to the importance of festal practice. The last feast to be adopted, the Transfiguration, seems to have been a statement of the ultimate sanction of Chalcedonian Orthodoxy as the official government position at the end of a long period of Christological argument.
The Twelve Great Feasts took on the superficial character of a life cycle of Christ for two reasons. First, by presenting their theology in the form of feasts commemorating events in the life of Christ they became more accessible to the faithful and more likely to make an impression on them. Second, as appeals in theological controversies, they called upon the ultimate theological authority--Christ himself.
The canon of the Twelve Great Feasts began to take shape as the great Christological controversies began. By the time those controversies reached their indecisive conclusion, all the feasts had been instituted. Thus, the post-Nicene feasts arose during the period of the great controversies, but the feasts themselves were more than the mere results of these arguments, they played an active, and at times even crucial, part in their outcome.
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