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The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe
Structured around in-depth and interconnected case studies and driven by a methodology of material, contextual, and iconographic analysis, this book argues that early European single-sheet prints, in both the north and south, are best understood as highly accessible objects shaped and framed by individual viewers. Author David Areford offers a synthetic historical narrative of early prints that stresses their unusual material nature, as well as their accessibility to a variety of viewers, both lay and monastic. This volume represents a shift in the study of the early printed image, one that mirrors the widespread movement in art history away from issues of production, style, and the artist toward issues of reception, function, and the viewer. Areford's approach is intensely grounded in the object, especially the unacknowledged material complexity of the print as a portable, malleable, and accessible image that depended on a response that was not only visual but often physical, emotional, and psychological. Recognizing that early prints were not primarily designed for aesthetic appreciation, the author analyzes how their meanings stemmed from specific functions involving private devotion, protection, indulgences, the cult of saints, pilgrimage, exorcism, the art of memory, and anti-Semitic propaganda. Although the medium's first century was clearly transitional and experimental, Areford explores how its potential to impact viewers in new ways”both positive and negative”was quickly realized.
346 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 2010
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May 15, 2011
(orginally published on TMR)
David S. Areford has written a lively and accessible book about
the reception of early prints in Europe. He has aimed not to
study early printed images on stylistic grounds nor as part of
regional "schools," as they are categorized in many print
rooms, but instead to relate narratives about how late
fifteenth-century recipients put them to use. This book joins
several other recent titles that have brought this previously
neglected topic into focus. Ursula Weekes and Peter Schmidt,
respectively, have written accounts of how prints were used in
place of miniatures in manuscripts of the fifteenth century in
the eastern Netherlands and Germany. For the past few decades,
Richard Field has written important studies and ground-laying
catalogues of early prints. And there have been two important
exhibition catalogues on related material: Susan Dackerman on
painted prints, and Peter Parshall on fifteenth-century
woodcuts, with an emphasis on their original contexts. [1]
Areford has drawn upon these studies by discussing the hand-
coloring, inscriptions, and manuscript contexts of early
prints, while introducing many images that are studied here for
the first time.
The title of the book recalls the great study by Hans Belting,
Das Bild und sein Publikum, translated in 1990 as The
Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of
Early Paintings of the Passion. [2] This was a rallying
cry to consider the anthropology of the image. As with
Belting's call for art historians to study the image
rather than the more conceptually problematic art,
Areford has succeeded in widening the scope of the image
historian's domain to include the cheap, the serially-produced,
the disposable, and the abject.
Areford divides his book into an introduction and a series of
case studies. His "Introduction: The Aura of the Printed
Image" lays to rest Walter Benjamin's famous but utterly flawed
statement made in his article of 1936: "That which withers in
the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of
art." [3] But as Areford points out, it is not the printed
image, nor the cookie-cutter saint nor the stack of printed
copies, that fascinates or exudes an aura; rather an image
acquires power through the way in which each individual print
is made singular. Sometimes this is the power of a cult
object, as with the case of the Madonna del Fuoco, a printed
image to which an entire chapel was built.
Continuing with this theme in Chapter 1, "The Materiality of
the Printed Image," Areford outlines some of the operations
that might render a print unique. Users shaped their prints to
make them resemble textiles, embroidery, and manuscript
illumination: this one is hand painted and gilt; that one has
been printed in glue and dusted with lint to make it resemble
velvet; and here is one has been pasted into a manuscript
prayer book; another has been silhouetted and recontextualized
into a group of other prints. In Areford's own words, he
questions "ideas about the print as a stable and consistent
medium dependent on a perfected and fixed graphic design" (26).
Areford considers owners' interactions with their prints in
Chapter 2, "Acts of Viewing." Most of the acts he discusses in
this chapter consist of owners' inscriptions. Some of these
form a dialogue between the viewer and the subject depicted,
such as the plea, "Ora pro me" (Pray for me!) written at the
top of an image of St. Jerome. Alternatively, some owners
trimmed their prints, cutting away distracting parts or
changing the meanings of the subjects depicted. In this way,
the owner/viewer becomes actively involved in producing
meaning. Areford is to be lauded for finding such rich
examples that demonstrate how people behaved with their prints,
and how they made singular that which was serially produced.
One of the pleasant surprises in this book is the amount of
early Italian material included. This field has been dominated
by studies of prints from the Middle Rhine, the cradle of
printmaking before 1500. Chapter 3, "The Ship and the
Skeleton: The Prints of Jacopo Rubieri," tells the fascinating
tale of a contested collection of prints in Ravenna's
Biblioteca Classense. The prints, many of them the earliest
surviving examples of Italian printmaking, had been glued into
legal manuscripts by their original, fifteenth-century owner,
until a late nineteenth-century curator decided to remove them.
Areford reconstructs the manuscripts-cum-prints as far as that
is possible and discovers relationships between the subjects of
the prints and their original placement in the manuscripts.
His work inspires me to go out and try to undo some of the more
destructive collecting habits of the Victorian period. My only
criticism is that he should have included photos of the legal
manuscripts from which the prints were harvested. For example,
he describes a page on which a print with a ship had been
pasted down: "Inexplicably, no scholar has ever explored the
ship's position in the manuscript or the fact that when in
situ, its mast was topped by a perfect circle cut from white
paper" which is "still glued to the page today" (143). Areford
should have illustrated this page. By omitting this and other
pages of the legal manuscripts and presenting only the prints,
he is guilty of the same thinking as the nineteenth-century
curator: that his audience would only want to look at the
pictures, not the text manuscript. The promise to
recontextualize falls short of providing the prints' full
original context.
Chapter 4, "Little Simon's Body," tells the fascinating tale of
how prints were exploited to create a cult of Simon of Trent, a
boy supposedly murdered by Jews in 1475. Simon's body, laid
out on an altar, started performing miracles. Prints helped to
publicize the miracles and to demonize the Jews, who were
depicted in a series of woodcuts made in 1475--thus,
immediately after Simon's death. The prints show the Jews
engaged in Simon's sadistic ritual murder. As Areford argues,
the images were used as evidence of the atrocities. This
chapter departs somewhat from the main themes set out in the
Introduction, as it does not focus on users' manipulations of
individual prints.
Chapter 5, "Printing the Side Wound of Christ," is drawn from
Areford's widely-cited article of 1998, "The Passion Measured:
A Late-Medieval Diagram of the Body of Christ," [4] which has
been substantially rewritten here. This chapter showcases
images that treat Christ's body in pieces, including printed
replicas of his freefloating side wound. Areford deftly argues
that images depicting the measured side wound function as maps
made to scale that negotiate the territory between symbolic and
actual space; and that the medium takes advantage of the
relationship between the printed image and the prototype. This
is especially true of Speerbilder, images of the Sacred
Heart which were to be pierced by the relic of the Holy Lance,
housed in Nuremberg. The image was to be pierced by the very
instrument that pierced Christ's side, thereby eliding the
print with its prototype.
One persistent verbal tic will date this volume to the early
noughts: "kind of." "[T]he illumination is designed as a
kind of author portrait" (112). "[T]he print functions
as a kind of moralizing commentary..." (137); "...the
actual measurement of the opening made by the lance, becoming a
kind of relic...of the side wound" (245). The
construction appears scores of times, but I shall not get my
knickers in a twist about it. With the small exception of the
legal manuscripts discussed above, Areford handles the
manuscript evidence adequately and handles the print evidence
very adeptly. Methodologically, the book is an object lesson
in grace. Areford follows the screenwriter's dictum: show,
don't tell. He demonstrates his method by example, which,
thankfully, basks in the materiality of the image. We need
more books like this one, and with it, more scholars who are
willing to roll up their sleeves and engage with the
physicality of their subjects.
--------
NOTES
[1] Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color in Northern
Renaissance & Baroque Engravings, Etchings & Woodcuts, ed.
Susan Dackerman, (exh. cat., The Baltimore Museum of Art; The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); Origins of
European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their
Public, ed. Peter Parshall and Rainer Schoch with David S.
Areford, Richard S. Field, and Peter Schmidt (exh. cat.,
National Gallery of Art, Washington; Germanisches
Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, in association with Yale University
Press, New Haven and London, 2005).
[2] Hans Belting, The image and its public in the Middle
Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion,
trans. by Mark Bartusis and Raymond Meyer (New Rochelle, N.Y:
A.D. Caratzas, 1990).
[3] Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt,
trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968),
pp. 217-251. The essay originally appeared as "Das Kunstwerk
im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,"
Zeitschrift fƒr Sozialforschung 5, no. 1 (1936).
[4] David S. Areford, "The Passion Measured: A Late-Medieval
Diagram of the Body of Christ," in The Broken Body: Passion
Devotion in Late-Medieval Culture, ed. A. A. MacDonald, H.
N. B. Ridderbos and R. M. Schlusemann (Groningen: Egbert
Forsten, 1998), pp. 211-238.
David S. Areford has written a lively and accessible book about
the reception of early prints in Europe. He has aimed not to
study early printed images on stylistic grounds nor as part of
regional "schools," as they are categorized in many print
rooms, but instead to relate narratives about how late
fifteenth-century recipients put them to use. This book joins
several other recent titles that have brought this previously
neglected topic into focus. Ursula Weekes and Peter Schmidt,
respectively, have written accounts of how prints were used in
place of miniatures in manuscripts of the fifteenth century in
the eastern Netherlands and Germany. For the past few decades,
Richard Field has written important studies and ground-laying
catalogues of early prints. And there have been two important
exhibition catalogues on related material: Susan Dackerman on
painted prints, and Peter Parshall on fifteenth-century
woodcuts, with an emphasis on their original contexts. [1]
Areford has drawn upon these studies by discussing the hand-
coloring, inscriptions, and manuscript contexts of early
prints, while introducing many images that are studied here for
the first time.
The title of the book recalls the great study by Hans Belting,
Das Bild und sein Publikum, translated in 1990 as The
Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of
Early Paintings of the Passion. [2] This was a rallying
cry to consider the anthropology of the image. As with
Belting's call for art historians to study the image
rather than the more conceptually problematic art,
Areford has succeeded in widening the scope of the image
historian's domain to include the cheap, the serially-produced,
the disposable, and the abject.
Areford divides his book into an introduction and a series of
case studies. His "Introduction: The Aura of the Printed
Image" lays to rest Walter Benjamin's famous but utterly flawed
statement made in his article of 1936: "That which withers in
the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of
art." [3] But as Areford points out, it is not the printed
image, nor the cookie-cutter saint nor the stack of printed
copies, that fascinates or exudes an aura; rather an image
acquires power through the way in which each individual print
is made singular. Sometimes this is the power of a cult
object, as with the case of the Madonna del Fuoco, a printed
image to which an entire chapel was built.
Continuing with this theme in Chapter 1, "The Materiality of
the Printed Image," Areford outlines some of the operations
that might render a print unique. Users shaped their prints to
make them resemble textiles, embroidery, and manuscript
illumination: this one is hand painted and gilt; that one has
been printed in glue and dusted with lint to make it resemble
velvet; and here is one has been pasted into a manuscript
prayer book; another has been silhouetted and recontextualized
into a group of other prints. In Areford's own words, he
questions "ideas about the print as a stable and consistent
medium dependent on a perfected and fixed graphic design" (26).
Areford considers owners' interactions with their prints in
Chapter 2, "Acts of Viewing." Most of the acts he discusses in
this chapter consist of owners' inscriptions. Some of these
form a dialogue between the viewer and the subject depicted,
such as the plea, "Ora pro me" (Pray for me!) written at the
top of an image of St. Jerome. Alternatively, some owners
trimmed their prints, cutting away distracting parts or
changing the meanings of the subjects depicted. In this way,
the owner/viewer becomes actively involved in producing
meaning. Areford is to be lauded for finding such rich
examples that demonstrate how people behaved with their prints,
and how they made singular that which was serially produced.
One of the pleasant surprises in this book is the amount of
early Italian material included. This field has been dominated
by studies of prints from the Middle Rhine, the cradle of
printmaking before 1500. Chapter 3, "The Ship and the
Skeleton: The Prints of Jacopo Rubieri," tells the fascinating
tale of a contested collection of prints in Ravenna's
Biblioteca Classense. The prints, many of them the earliest
surviving examples of Italian printmaking, had been glued into
legal manuscripts by their original, fifteenth-century owner,
until a late nineteenth-century curator decided to remove them.
Areford reconstructs the manuscripts-cum-prints as far as that
is possible and discovers relationships between the subjects of
the prints and their original placement in the manuscripts.
His work inspires me to go out and try to undo some of the more
destructive collecting habits of the Victorian period. My only
criticism is that he should have included photos of the legal
manuscripts from which the prints were harvested. For example,
he describes a page on which a print with a ship had been
pasted down: "Inexplicably, no scholar has ever explored the
ship's position in the manuscript or the fact that when in
situ, its mast was topped by a perfect circle cut from white
paper" which is "still glued to the page today" (143). Areford
should have illustrated this page. By omitting this and other
pages of the legal manuscripts and presenting only the prints,
he is guilty of the same thinking as the nineteenth-century
curator: that his audience would only want to look at the
pictures, not the text manuscript. The promise to
recontextualize falls short of providing the prints' full
original context.
Chapter 4, "Little Simon's Body," tells the fascinating tale of
how prints were exploited to create a cult of Simon of Trent, a
boy supposedly murdered by Jews in 1475. Simon's body, laid
out on an altar, started performing miracles. Prints helped to
publicize the miracles and to demonize the Jews, who were
depicted in a series of woodcuts made in 1475--thus,
immediately after Simon's death. The prints show the Jews
engaged in Simon's sadistic ritual murder. As Areford argues,
the images were used as evidence of the atrocities. This
chapter departs somewhat from the main themes set out in the
Introduction, as it does not focus on users' manipulations of
individual prints.
Chapter 5, "Printing the Side Wound of Christ," is drawn from
Areford's widely-cited article of 1998, "The Passion Measured:
A Late-Medieval Diagram of the Body of Christ," [4] which has
been substantially rewritten here. This chapter showcases
images that treat Christ's body in pieces, including printed
replicas of his freefloating side wound. Areford deftly argues
that images depicting the measured side wound function as maps
made to scale that negotiate the territory between symbolic and
actual space; and that the medium takes advantage of the
relationship between the printed image and the prototype. This
is especially true of Speerbilder, images of the Sacred
Heart which were to be pierced by the relic of the Holy Lance,
housed in Nuremberg. The image was to be pierced by the very
instrument that pierced Christ's side, thereby eliding the
print with its prototype.
One persistent verbal tic will date this volume to the early
noughts: "kind of." "[T]he illumination is designed as a
kind of author portrait" (112). "[T]he print functions
as a kind of moralizing commentary..." (137); "...the
actual measurement of the opening made by the lance, becoming a
kind of relic...of the side wound" (245). The
construction appears scores of times, but I shall not get my
knickers in a twist about it. With the small exception of the
legal manuscripts discussed above, Areford handles the
manuscript evidence adequately and handles the print evidence
very adeptly. Methodologically, the book is an object lesson
in grace. Areford follows the screenwriter's dictum: show,
don't tell. He demonstrates his method by example, which,
thankfully, basks in the materiality of the image. We need
more books like this one, and with it, more scholars who are
willing to roll up their sleeves and engage with the
physicality of their subjects.
--------
NOTES
[1] Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color in Northern
Renaissance & Baroque Engravings, Etchings & Woodcuts, ed.
Susan Dackerman, (exh. cat., The Baltimore Museum of Art; The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); Origins of
European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their
Public, ed. Peter Parshall and Rainer Schoch with David S.
Areford, Richard S. Field, and Peter Schmidt (exh. cat.,
National Gallery of Art, Washington; Germanisches
Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, in association with Yale University
Press, New Haven and London, 2005).
[2] Hans Belting, The image and its public in the Middle
Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion,
trans. by Mark Bartusis and Raymond Meyer (New Rochelle, N.Y:
A.D. Caratzas, 1990).
[3] Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt,
trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968),
pp. 217-251. The essay originally appeared as "Das Kunstwerk
im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,"
Zeitschrift fƒr Sozialforschung 5, no. 1 (1936).
[4] David S. Areford, "The Passion Measured: A Late-Medieval
Diagram of the Body of Christ," in The Broken Body: Passion
Devotion in Late-Medieval Culture, ed. A. A. MacDonald, H.
N. B. Ridderbos and R. M. Schlusemann (Groningen: Egbert
Forsten, 1998), pp. 211-238.
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