1 - Past Present

Summary

The ‘‘Unicorn’s’’ utter inscrutability, its utter foreignness makes it only the more divine.

Georges Bataille, Lascaux or the Birth of Art

EVOKING PRESENCE

At the turn of the nineteenth century archeologists coined the neologism ‘‘Romanesque’’ in English and ‘‘roman’’ in French to signal their proposition that medieval architecture revived antique techniques and vocabulary. Whatever shortcomings might be identified in this term, its implicit historicism has a certain aptness with respect to many carvings of monsters that represent longstanding types. The griffin, manticore, siren, and other fabulous creatures on a pier from Souvigny (fig. 6), for example, stem from ancient pictorial traditions and are clearly identified with inscribed names, the same used by Pliny the Elder, Solinus, and other proto-scientists. Other faces of this damaged and incomplete monolith feature astrological signs and calendrical scenes that likewise have roots in classical traditions. It hardly matters whether the designers of this pier had firsthand knowledge of ancient artistic models, for these established types offered Romanesque designers authoritative building blocks with which they could imaginatively construct a cosmology. Unfortunately, the scant archeological and documentary record associated with this work does not permit us to reconstruct the original architectural context, though Neil Stratford has suggested that the pier originally served as the gnomon of a sundial within a cloister, a setting that would have added further density to the spatio-temporal associations of its carved imagery.

Building on the insights of Harold Bloom, Norman Bryson has identified the creative engagement with tradition as central to the artistic process, that an individual artist must continually articulate insights in terms of established cultural schema. For Bryson, the insight of an artist is always “undone”, because once achieved, she must articulate her vision in the terms of a visual language that preceded her. It is unclear, as Bloom and Bryson suggest, that artists’ inevitable reliance upon the past was necessarily marked by an anxiety of influence. Medieval artists could embrace acts of appropriation. M.B. Pranger, for one, has noted a marked artifice in many twelfthcentury monastic writings, and has argued that this authorial strategy served seemingly contrary desires, namely gaining access to individualized experience by relying heavily upon literary conventions. By inflecting prose with the language of the past, individuals could evoke a dense network of associations that offered a reliable vehicle to access the complexities of lived experience.