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The crystal codex: Iacobus , Galicia, and the dream of the archive
Abstract
This essay focuses on two previously unpublished photographs of the Dream of Charlemagne, one of most famous illuminations from the twelfth-century Codex Calixtinus (Santiago Cathedral Library, MS. CF 14), which allow the reconstruction of details of its composition that seemed to have been lost. The search for these photographs goes parallel with an immersion in the archive of the Seminario de Estudos Galegos, a research institution that was preparing the first modern edition of the Codex Calixtinus, including photographs of its illuminations, when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936. The Seminario was closed down after the war by the Francoist regime leaving the scattered galleys of the Codex Calixtinus edition as its last ruined monument. I propose a Benjaminian pilgrimage through the archive of the Seminario, taking the Dream of Charlemagne as a “dialectical image” allowing us to meditate on the historical processes to which this illumination bears witness. The article engages with the theory and materiality of photography, the archaeology of archives, and the significance of medieval manuscripts as national emblems in the twentieth century. As a coda, it reveals the medieval model inspiring Paul Klee's Angelus Novus, turned by Walter Benjamin into an image of his “angel of history.”
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Focusing on a series of extraordinary photographs of the sarcophagus lid of Alfonso Ansúrez (d. 1093), I delve in this essay into its formal, iconographic and performative aspects as I follow its geographical and temporal iterations in the first decades of the twentieth century. It traveled from the municipal cemetery of Sahagún, where it had been reused as the tombstone of a local townsman, sailing across the Atlantic to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, and then returning to Spain to become a stellar exhibit in the recently renovated National Archaeological Museum in Madrid. Each of these photographs records a unique intersubjective encounter between the figures carved on the lid, especially Alfonso's marble embodiment, represented in the moment of his glorious resurrection following classical models of the myth of Endymion, and the persons on the other side of the lens. Notable among them were the art historian Ricardo de Orueta, who was Director General of Fine Arts in the government of the Spanish Republic, and the eminent Harvard medievalist Arthur Kingsley Porter. Made available to many eyes/I's through their photographs, the sepulchral slab acquired a new aesthetic life and a pathway into the mainstream historiography of the Romanesque. An analysis of the photographs serves to reveal essential aspects of the work presenting it as an important case study to investigate the dialectics of death and resurrection, both in the context of Christian dogma and within the art historical discussions around the question of the Nachleben der Antike, inspiring a theoretical inquiry into the significance of artworks as they exist and acquire meaning through the conflu-ence of the time of nature, the time of life, the time of history, and the time of eschatology.
Taking the Aeneid as a methodological environment and ekphrasis as an analytical principle, with the historiographical background provided by the Historia Seminense, this article offers a complex vision of the imbrications between art, politics, and tragedy in the Kingdom of Leon-Castile during the reigns of Fernando I (r. 1037-1065) and Alfonso VI (r. 1065-1109). A study of the historical and human context of the patronage of Queen Sancha and her daughter Urraca in San Isidoro de Leon reveals the crucial role played by these two women in the regeneration and perpetuation of the Leonese dynasty at a historical moment defined by profound transformations, which inspired the creation of central works in the corpus of medieval art such as the Liber diurnus, the Royal Pantheon and the Portal of the Lamb. The analysis of themes such as the survival of myth, the translatio imperii, and the maternity of parchment is combined with a reevaluation of the work of important authors in traditional Spanish historiography, with the aim of initiating a dialogue towards the renewal of Spanish medieval art history in the 21st century.
En 1923 el medievalista americano Arthur Kingsley Porter (1883-1933) publicó, en diez volúmenes, su libro titulado Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads. El presente artículo analiza y contextualiza ese primer viaje de Porter al norte de España en 1920, durante el que realizó su única visita a Santiago de Compostela, antes de la publicación del citado libro. Dicho viaje desempeñó, por lo tanto, un papel fundamental en la conceptualización de sus ideas, las cuales llevaron a que la historiografía internacional prestase, por primera vez, atención a muchos monumentos medievales de España. Este ensayo explora, a partir de fuentes archivísticas, los primeros encuentros de Porter con el arte y la cultura del norte de España, identifica alguno de los sitios que él visitó a lo largo del Camino de Santiago y, asimismo, considera su modus operandi, especialmente, su análisis de obras específicas del arte y la arquitectura románicas por medio del estudio in situ de los monumentos, anotaciones de primera mano y el uso de la fotografía.
Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts takes as its starting point an understanding that a medieval book is a whole object at every point of its long history. As such, medieval books can be studied most profitably in a holistic manner as objects-in-the-world. This means readers might profitably account for all aspects of the manuscript in their observations, from the main texts that dominate the codex to the marginal notes, glosses, names, and interventions made through time. This holistic approach allows us to tell the story of the book’s life from the moment of its production to its use, collection, breaking-up, and digitization—all aspects of what can be termed ‘dynamic architextuality’. The ten chapters of this study include detailed readings of texts that explain the processes of manuscript manufacture and writing, taking in invisible components of the book that show the joy and delight clearly felt by producers and consumers. Chapters investigate the filling of manuscripts’ blank spaces, presenting some texts never examined before, and assessing how books were conceived and understood to function. Manuscripts’ heft and solidness can be seen, too, in the depictions of miniature books in medieval illustrations. Early manuscripts thus become archives and witnesses to individual and collective memories, best read as ‘relics of existence’, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes things. As such, it is urgent that practices fragmenting the manuscript through book-breaking or digital display are understood in the context of the book’s wholeness. Readers of this study will find chapters on multiple aspects of medieval bookness in the distant past, the present, and in the assurance of the future continuity of this most fascinating of cultural artefacts.
This innovative volume explores the idea that while photographs are images, they are also objects, and this materiality is integral to their meaning and use. The case studies presented focus on photographs active in different institutional, political, religious and domestic spheres, where physical properties, the nature of their use and the cultural formations in which they function make their 'objectness' central to how we should understand them. The book's contributions are drawn from disciplines including the history of photography, visual anthropology and art history, with case studies from a range of countries such as the Netherlands, North America, Australia, Japan, Romania and Tibet. Each shows the methodological strategies they have developed in order to fully exploit the idea of the materiality of photographic images. . © 2004 selection and editorial matter Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart.
During the 1920s two well known scholars, Émile Mâle and Arthur Kingsley Porter, sparred over the advent of Romanesque sculpture on the Iberian peninsula in a quarrel that is familiar to historians of Romanesque art. Borrowing their approach from Joseph Bédier's theories about the formation of the chansons de geste, both scholars proposed that the pilgrimage to Santiago stimulated the creation of Romanesque style by carrying a free flow of artists, architects, and artistic ideas from one region to the next. The date and national origin of the artists who created the Romanesque style were the main points of contention. Both men created the impression of a homogeneous art and architecture formed by an artistic cross-pollination, which occurred without regard for indigenous cultural forms, ethnic identity, regional boundaries, or geographic obstacles. Once hypothesized, however, this politically neutral international Romanesque style was deployed in line with the various agendas of the authors. This paper explores the personal, methodological, and ideological convictions that shaped Porter's and Mâle's scholarly views of the pilgrimage roads as a site of exceptional creativity. Their scholarship, I contend, reveals as much about them and their ethos as it does about the middle ages.
Walter Benjamin's magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen-Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form.
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