 Rhaid, rydyn ni'n ddweud bod yn ddweud. Felly, rwy'n rwy'n gweithio, mae'n rhaid i'w Mark Hallott, mae'r ddechrau ar y ddechrau am y dyfodol yn y Llyfrgell Llyfrgell, ac mae'n defnyddio ar y ddefnyddio'r ysgrifennu ar y dyfodol ar y dyfodol yma ar y dyfodol. Rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio yma. Ond o'r gweithio, yna'n gweithio'n gweithio, mae'r ddechrau, dyma'r gweithio'n gweithio, mae'n ddweud fy amser gweld wedi yw'r amser, felly o ddod rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio a fally o'r gweithio, mae'r gweithio i mi saith i'r gweithio a gyfle o mydwyr i'r roddauog rhaid i London i nodod siarroed, mae'r gweithio i chi gweld mae'r gweithio a'r ardal a'u dlinig yw'r gweith wneud i'r gweithio ac hetwch, chi'n ddiolch aru'n gweithio Ben Thomas ond Kitai and the Revolution in History painting. We have a talk in November on the 21st, which is devoted to a remarkable dinner set painted by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, and a set that we're going to be presenting alongside a film that we've done, which puts it in the context of Judy Chicago's great work of art at the dinner party too. So, a lot of really interesting events, and then right towards the end of our programme in December, on the 8th of December we have what is now becoming a regular feature, our book night, where you'll have the chance to meet some of the authors and hear from them about their recent books that we've been publishing. People like Elizabeth Pretjol and Marcia Cwpfer and Maureen Arnill are going to be coming and talking about their recent publications, books that we've published over the last six months or so. So I hope you agree, a really interesting programme of things to come along. If you don't already get it, please sign up for PMC Notes, which is our newsletter and diary, and gives the full details of our programme, and otherwise, if you haven't already got a copy, you can always pick one up from downstairs. But yeah, it's a particular treat to welcome Paul. Just to say, tonight's format is, as we normally follow, it's a talk of, I don't know, 45, 50 minutes? An hour probably. Then some time for questions and some drinks afterwards, when you have a chance to respond directly to the talk, but also to catch up with Paul in conversation next door in our anti-room. But this is not the first time I've introduced Paul, but it's a total treat to welcome him here again. And it's always a thrill to listen to his most recent research. And I hardly need to tell all of you that he's one of our most consistently brilliant and original art historians. And I think he's looking, thinking back on his career, he's one of those very rare scholars who's managed to transcend all the cliches of a glittering academic career or a classic academic career. He's not been one of those art historians who peak early and then enter a long period of slow decline. He managed to avoid that pitfall. We all know, I mean, we can all look at ourselves and wonder about which category that we've fallen into. He's managed to avoid all this. He's also not been one of those scholars who burn themselves out at mid-career and who will console themselves thereafter by taking refuge in the rituals of university administration. We all know who we are on that front. And then nor is he someone who's one of those mature scholars who's more recent works are marked but with the self-indulgence and extra-interesses of a late style. He seems to have managed to avoid all those cliches brilliantly. And I think rather what we can say is that ever since his first publications, Paul has been an artist drawer and has managed somehow to stay fresh and to fuse original creative thought with the higher standards of intellectual rigor. He seems to have kept his mind open and consistently open to new and old ideas, to the power of texts and objects and to the interpretive methods of both history and art history. Always been interesting to watch Paul move in between those disciplines and bring them together in fresh ways. And I think part of this ability to stay fresh has been thanks in part at least to his longstanding and now quite famous, I think, commitment, at least in our world, to teaching and to teaching students of all levels, undergraduates to PhDs and to learning from them as he does so. And I've been privileged to look and see the dedication to his newest book and that commitment to teaching is one that he expresses very eloquently in the dedication. And I think it's a sincere and important one and I think is at least part of the reason why this commitment to teaching and to this engagement in conversation and discussion with students has at least been one of the reasons why Paul has somehow managed to stay so alive and lively. So the topic of today's talk comes from this most recent publication, a book that's the fourth of a quartet that Yale have published and we've been privileged to publish with Yale over the course of the last few years. And they are a pretty remarkable series. His first book, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets, published in 1995, was a winner of the Longman's History Today Prize. Beckett's Crown, Art and Imagination in Gothic England, 1170-1300, published in 2004, was a winner of the Historians of British Art Prize in the single author book category on a topic pre-1800, published in 2004. Thirdly, Gothic Wonder, Art, Artifice and the Decorated Style, 1290-1350 was a winner of the 2016 Historians of British Art Book Award. For again, for exemplary scholarship on the period before 1800, I think any other historian who publishes on the period 1800 period always knows that that year Paul's book will probably end up winning. But tonight's talk touches on the ideas that Paul has developed in his most recent, in his newest book, Gothic Sculpture, which again we're really thrilled to be publishing in May of next year. It's a book that we're all looking forward to. As I said, some of us have had the chance to glance at it already and to see it already, and it's a thrilling new intervention from Paul. So we're thrilled not only to be publishing that book, but also very much looking forward to hearing tonight's talk, which is, I think, a little bit of a trailer for that book and some of the ideas that you explore within it. So I can ask you all to welcome Paul Binskey. Thank you very much. I cannot tell you how touched I am by your introduction, Mark, and I'd just like to say at the outset that the support over the years that I've had from Paul Malinsanta and Yale have been terrific. I'm most grateful. I mean it's not just support, it's expertise, but it's warmth and encouragement too. So thank you and thank you for asking me to come this evening. I was advised that I should keep this paper to sort of 50 minutes. The likelihood of this is small, I may as well say right at the start, but it's not going to go on forever. But I am going to talk about my forthcoming book, The Blurb. I'm conscious. My sort of proposal this evening sounds terribly challenging and exciting and I was going to take issue with people there for right in the centre. And I sort of am going to do that actually. I'm very struck going through the proofs and reading the book. It's a very reflective book. It's empirically based. I am an ordinary art historian. But it is a book which tries to reflect on current predicaments in understanding not just sculpture really. Sculpture is the occasion or pretext for talking about aesthetic issues more generally. So that's what I want to do. Because by considering the many powers of sculpture I want to investigate the calculated eloquence of gothic works of art more generally. Particularly the way they engage us through their crafted substance and form. Sculpture I need to hardly say stands out because it's graspable nature, lends it power. It uses a wide variety of materials and sculpting, carving and hewing are associated with a rich practical and figurative language. Sculpting embodied dangers. But it was also good to think with. When the great Roman rhetorician Quintillion criticised those who rushed into written composition by hasty drafting he called the unformed starting point of raw material, material silver. A sort of primordial chaos or forest. Better, he said, to take care from the start and chisel your material into shape accurately. A good point for all writers, I think. In Martianus Capella's widely read 5th century de noopteis philologie et mercurie a medieval set text for the origin of the liberal arts the personification of grammar takes a pruning knife out of her toolbox in order to excise faults of grammar and pronunciation in the young. The soul and body were things that could both be crafted improved on the model of sculpture in his Aeneads. The philosopher Platinus had spoken of the beautifying of the soul as if it were a polished and chiseled statue. Later, in the same vein, the Parisian Dominican Hugh of Saint-Sher who died in 1263, likened the process of filing, sawing and polishing ivory to the refining tribulations of the saints represented, of course, along with Old Testament personages on those great portals at Chantre Cathedral, which is our opening slide. By being carved, chiseled, pruned and polished, a text or an artifact has long been thought to become eloquent, a human body virtuous. Sculpture had the metaphorical power to express rich and complex ideas long before Michelangelo's emergent marble slaves. My own toolbox is that of one kind of ordinary art historian and I've wielded my pruning knife as far as I can this evening to keep things short and sweet, but I do have conscious limitations in what I cover in my book. I don't consider Italy, for example. My concerns are primarily, are not primarily, with the cultic, miraculous or performative aspects of sculpture important as these are. My blurb has sort of gave the impression that I was perhaps going to argue that they weren't important. I have a slightly different question to ask. These aspects, indeed, now dominate much of the literature on the subject and are better and much more fully treated elsewhere. So instead I've carved and polished my own material with as much independence of mind as I can muster in order to confront specific difficulties, which commentators on medieval sculpture and the arts more generally have, I think, created for themselves. What I have to say about the experience of Gothic sculpture necessarily has implications for the media generally. And so to address those particular problems, I've written a book in two parts. The first part concentrates on stone as a chatre, particularly the large portals that developed from the late 11th century in northwestern Europe and throughout the 12th and 13th. I argue that such portals should be seen primarily as public monuments. Such portals, if I may be given a shorthand distinction, have functions, but they also have purposes or ends. And those ends I consider to be social, including not only admiration and the giving of pleasure, but the attainment of conviction by means of artful persuasion. The sculpted figures on Romanesque and Gothic doorways do not just convey doctrine, but are conventionalised tools of eloquence, which draws in and move us, the spectators, but also get us to think and, primarily, ultimately, to act. Such experiences are, by their nature, aesthetic. By which I mean sensation-based. As in the verbal arts, figures, figure, lead us through our experience of the artefact. There's a present great deal of interest in the affective capacities of medieval art, which I share. Persuasion is the product of a melding of thought and sensation, or, broadly speaking, emotion. Sensation colours thought, and thought colours sensation. My understanding of emotion is essentially cognitive. For this, I find support in the most widely accepted models of cognition and causation put to practical effect in the Middle Ages, which derived from Aristotle and from Avicenna, his follower. Agency and intentionality develop in engaged, transactional situations that occur in the public domain. Portals are a good instance of that occasional context. These transactions, like all aesthetic experiences, are occasional. By which I mean something specific. They are dependent on context, situation and decorum. I borrow the term occasion from rhetorical analysis. Because they are socially defined, they limit the audience's horizon of experience. My emphasis generally is less on individual response and psychology, more on social signification, and hence ultimately on the political force of images. Rhetorical analysis is the best place to consider the social and intended aspects of meaning, the idol that falls victim to it, and I'm going to be rattling a few perches of idols. The idols may not tumble down, but I'm going to be sort of wobbling the columns and the idol will do this. It won't topple. But cage rattling is part of the purpose. The idol that falls victim to this emphasis on public engagement is that of personal psychology and empathetic engagement, and I choose the word empathy deliberately because I am critical of the use of the word empathy. Some modern and functional and empathetic readings and medieval works of art have tried to inject life into them, in effect to re-enchant them, while also making problematical claims about emotion, thought and representation, which descend, I think, from romanticism and from its preoccupations with sincerity. In confronting some of those claims, I return the discussion to the way artifice itself shapes objects and subjects, and at the heart of this idea of artifice is the ancient and widely applicable concept of technae, craft or art. From this classicist as distinct from romantic concept or perspective, even experience itself is a crafted thing, rendered eloquent, not by freedom, but by a kind of skilled limitation or a scasis, a deliberate boxing in, as it were. I illustrate the wonderful figures in the Choir at Namburg, so controversial at the moment, so much being written about them as demonstrations of virtually any theory you wish, including Asaf Pincus' recent work on simulacra. In part one, I offer a critique of the risks of emotivist analysis. The second part of my book, which is really what I want to talk about at more length today, interrogates the re-magicking of art. Here, I'm concerned not with exterior sculpture, but with the no less social world of the interior artwork, and it's associated media, starting with wood, and I'll show you the beautiful version with its original pull-at-creme version from Haydalen in Auckland in Norway, now in Oslo. I continue my critique of post-medieval notions of authenticity as opposed to my real concern, artifice. In particular, I have in mind two modern idols. The first idol, which I think has long since really been struck down, was the post-cantian idol of aesthetic detachment, strawman of image anthropology. The second idol set up in its place and still standing is the anaesthetic image of presence, of life, of the image as an excessive thing. In regard to the excessive image, about which again, there's a great deal of debate, I deliberately distanced myself from my discussion from animist and materialist theories, which to my mind entail a form of reification of presence and stuff without sufficient regard to historically defined representational thought and production. I don't doubt for a second that images could be in way regarded as things capable of animation. My concern is that the relation of this belief to the critical apprehension of the object as an intended artefact is never rendered clear. This is going to land me in trouble, I'm sure, in some quarters. I don't care, I'm going to say it, because I think it does have to be said. I argue therefore against an undue suppression of human agency in the making and perception of things. Images may well be presences, but they're also representations, and to bypass that fact leads to a disregard, to my mind, for their crafting. Craft, what I've called the hope, the human poetics of materials, matter because they lend rationally guided eloquence to things, materials, and style to gather, possess intent. Materials matter fundamentally to craft as art historians have long known and long understood. But they're seldom innocent, thriving, I think, on reputations attributed to them by thinking, feeling, subjects. In other words, people. Representation doesn't consist of substitution, as some have argued recently. I'm going to be returning to this problem of representation and substitution shortly. But rather of thoughtful conception and preconception, medieval art, I argue, often revels in illusion quite as much as in touch. It welcomes the undeceived depiction, and vivid mental image-making, often the most important form of medieval imagination, understood as a composing faculty, wasn't a material thing at all. The most important images of the Middle Ages were images in the mind. For want of time, and rather than skim, I want to focus now on some aspects of the second part of my book, which is entitled Wood, Bone and Flesh. A wit, I can't trace this quotation if anybody knows who it was, on it, a wit once upon a time on hearing an earnest report of an apparition of the Virgin Mary inquired mock innocently, really, I wonder what period. A living vision the Virgin might indeed have been, but she was still perceived in whatever guise imaginatively came to mind. Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Pre-Raphaelite, Chris Ophilly, and so on. This quip, and I wish I could work out who said it, expresses in a nutshell some of the thoughts which follow for the next few minutes. Imagination and convention, visio, revelatio, mediated by human art. Arthur Danto, the philosopher, reviewing a well-known study of the power of images, need I say that it was written by David Friedberg, made a trenchant intervention about the tendency of art historians to dig holes for themselves. He said of David Friedberg's book that it is easy as if, I quote, either you relate to images claimed to possess such powers as lacrimation or lactation, or you're some kind of formalist numb to the magical powers of art. He went on to observe, I think rightly, that I quote, almost everything interesting about art lies somewhere between these two disjuncts. End quote. Danto was of course not hostile to the power of images. Neither am I, yet he was rightly suspicious of efforts to corral imagery either into a kind of animist camp in which images are not just lively but alive, two things not always distinguished, something can possess life but not be alive, or into a reactionary and embarrassingly empty formalism. Well, earlier I mentioned the unhelpful antithesis of two modern idols of thought, Kantian aesthetic detachment on the one hand, and the excessive image possessed of life and presence on the other. Danto has a point. What's of interest often lies between the two. Now, Danto illuminated this issue by considering the distinction, if you'll forgive a bit of technical language for a moment, the distinction between immanence and transience. Transeunce, that is to say. But simply, immanence is cause from within the thing. Transience is cause from outside the thing. Each might be religious in implication, for example. The belief that God created the world from without is transient. He acted upon the world. The belief that a statue of the Virgin Mary, as the one on the screen, in some sense is the Virgin Mary, is imminent. It has a thing within it, as it were. That acts upon itself. The philosophical distinction between the two isn't always clear cut, but it seems to me that while an imminent view of an artwork will necessarily be connected to the belief that it contains within itself some sort of self-moving life, a transient experience of that artwork need not necessarily do so. Well, despite that separation, the transient modality is not an empty experience. It isn't necessary to a full sensory and intellectual encounter with an artefact that we should believe it actually to be alive or self-moving to illustrate the point. Here are those famous textbook images from the West Front of Reims Cathedral, dating to whenever people present think. Great controversy about this. Somewhere between 1230 and 1260, let's say, depending on who you believe. Let me just maintain looking at the angel Gabriel on the left-hand side, one of the most famous images of the 13th century. The wonderful smiling images at Reims are undoubtedly lively, but it's far from clear that to have this perception of them, we need to see them as being actually alive. Were this the case, we couldn't give, I think, an aesthetic account by which I mean far more than a formalist account of the experience of architecture or of a text, things which are not ipso facto alive and yet which have an aesthetic, a capable of creating aesthetic experience. And this is one reason why theories of medieval art which focus solely on the figurative arts may mislead. An artwork may or may not be alive, but either way, it possesses agency as an artefact. Well, one starting point for all such discussion is Aby Vaerborg's Denck Rams Verlust. That is to say, the tendency of the human mind to confuse the sign with the thing signified. I'll go back to Hedalen. One sign of that, of course, is metaphor, the richness of metaphor which works in exactly that way. There's no need to dismiss the idea that some or many medieval people, as anthropologists and historians tend to refer to them, believed that images had presence. Many modern people still do. To deny the power of images to move or apparently perform the miraculous would be pointless, it would be an uphill task. Of course, the standard defence of imagery in the Middle Ages in the Latin Church for the most part rejected the idea of immanence, presence or inheritance, as my colleague at Cambridge, Donald Cooper, puts it in a study of the monumental cross in medieval Italy, I quote, images directed and channeled devotion towards eternal figures and mysteries but were not ontologically elided with them. That's the official position, of course. What Michael Baxendall called, I quote, the decent and rational theory of images recommended to the people, end quote, regarding the dangers of idolatry, was also probably conformed to by many before and after the Reformation, which in England did much to destroy the medieval landscape of images but exceptional survivals such as the Langham Virgin and Child and the Victoria and Albert Museum, which I believe is the only surviving Madonna from medieval England. And it's not in very good condition. It's from the Parish. It was long associated with the Parish Church of Langham in Essex, now the V&A. It's emphatically not my role here to argue against the excessive or out-of-bounds object. We can and should allow our images to live and even exceed because here we're asking different questions of them. We don't have to choose. But in setting aside these categories and choices we still encounter our two idols. Anthropological modes of criticism have offered particular challenges to Westerners' thesis and indeed the whole concept of art by endeavouring to breathe life into old things to see them instrumentally, magically or performatively and explicitly not aesthetically. The taboo here derives, I think, from an insistence on the link, insistence on the link of aesthetic experience and Western style aesthetic discrimination as an elitist and Eurocentric pathology. In distancing the discussion from the latter the thesis itself is rejected. This rejection, I suggest, in turn robs our objects of study of one aspect of their agency, namely that their representations as well as presences and that's really my key point. The roots of this unhelpful slippage run deep in modern Western thinking. Goethe and Hegel noted that religious power and devotion generally attach to poor, grotty or damaged works such as our Langan virgin and not to great works of art. Thereby validating a long and rather troubling association of certain forms of Christian with what they deemed to be low cultural or social form. It was only a short step from this to the belief that the being of an image, its eminence, might be more powerful and so more interesting to us than its art or that the power of art might actually detract from the power of the image, its presence. Medieval sources occasionally appear to lend weight to this privileging of the image over art. For example, the celebrated and often quoted dialogue on miracles written by the 13th century Cistercian Caesarius of Heistabach mentions the powers of an old, unskillfully formed, yet virtuous image. It was virtuous because it was old and unskillful of Virgin Mary, of which a woman in the congregation remarked tactlessly, why does this piece of old rubbish stand here? Whereupon the Virgin Mary herself punitively deprived the woman of all good fortune. Notice that the Virgin Mary did that, not the image. In its modern form, as Danto noted, this mindset implicitly considers aesthetic experience itself to be a form of idolatry, that idolatry transfers from the immanence onto the artwork. The worship of things empty of life. Characteristic of it is a preoccupation with the function of artefacts rather than with their purpose. I grant that's a slightly compressed view, but I take a teleological view. Things have functions, but they have endpoints or purposes. They have a final cause. Indeed, purpose and function ends and means become one and a new idol is lifted up. In his study, The Gothic Idol, Michael Camille of Blessed Memory, approvingly cited the anthropologist Clifford Gears, stating, I quote, the aesthetic anaesthetises it annihilates function, taking the object of interest out of the realm of necessity into the disinterested contemplation of the subjective viewer's consciousness. I end quote. Alfred Gell also stresses the agency of art in bringing about changed social behaviour, and yet he strips out aesthetic experience from that agency totally, as far as I can see at least in some of his publications. In doing so, I want to suggest, such writers set up a false dichotomy between a basically post-cantian notion of aesthetics and depth of meaning, which bear no relation to medieval notions of asthesis, medieval notions of asthesis, as sense-based, surface-bound experience and knowledge, which precisely constitute rather than mask ordinary experience. Agency occurs within the experience of the artefact and it surfaces and isn't independent of it, in other words. A kind of straw man is set up that asthesis is identified with detachment. No, it isn't, not in the medieval understanding of this aesthetic, which is sense-based experience of surface, the actual substantive form of the object itself. I think this is a radical misunderstanding and we need to get some clarity about it. I may be wrong, but I want to propose that this is so. Well, such methods are constitutionally disinclined to engage in close reading of the actual appearance of works of art and so to explore the particularity of experience and what emerges from it, because close reading is regarded as a compromised vehicle of disinterestedness. Any image in many books published on medieval art nowadays or on the history of religion or the social history of religion, any image might be substituted for any other and frequently provided such images act adequately as illustrative or demonstrative signs of an instrumental role or use function. The flattening effect of this way of thinking should be noted. These theories can account for similarity, but they never account for difference. Clearly a rich account of experience is not readily reducible to or ascertainable from function. Look, I can easily ascertain the function of a piano by waggling its keys up and down, by trying its keys. I can pretend that the function of a piano explains the music of Bach or Beethoven, but not for long, because without having any sense of the music a piano produces, something of an entirely different order is missing, namely what it is to experience music, let alone the difference between Bach and Beethoven. A functional account of a piano gives you no account of that miracle, that miraculous difference, which is still, I think, of interest and importance to us. Difference disappears, but the use function is the same. The objection to such instrumentality runs deep, it has no teleology, it has no sense of purpose or outcome. Artifacts, it seems to me, are enmeshed in complex patterns of intentionality that require not just a function, but also objects and subjects. They possess agency through their intention or inclination, which is manifest in their formal arrangement of what they actually look like, and that in turn shapes the intentions of those that experience them. The mixed agency of artworks entails a prior imaginative concept, an idea or representation. The apparition of the Virgin Mary that I alluded to earlier on belongs to a period of art, because that is what the compositoral imagination I think it almost invariably means. Socioratorical analysis, which is rooted in medieval theories of mind and emotion, clarifies some of these questions by restoring aesthetic experience, sensation-based experience, to its proper place. Something worker day, something ordinary, not as something which can be an object of idolatry. It also provides a practical and historically-based critical language to evaluate that experience. It understands that imagining and imagination are connected, and that their social, engaged, participative, but also purposive. Important to this is a shared and shareable body of human experience method and judgment, typical of the working of material into art, whether it's textual material or visual material. You will all recall, if you're medievalists and classicists, that famous dictum of Ovid, cited throughout the Middle Ages, Materiam suparabat opus, from the second book of the Metamorphoses, the workmanship surpassed the materials. That suggests the priority of artifice without demoting materiality. If you think the materials are great, look at the workmanship. And yet, as we shall see, some current versions of the materiality immanence theory explicitly or implicitly demote human agency. And we might ask of such theories why Ovid's dictum was so very popular in the first place. Surely artifacts have material and formal causes. They matter not in virtue simply of what they're made, but as it were, what form they take and to what end. By sidestepping this, we run the risk of disregarding the processial character of artifacts that objects aren't just in fact stuff, but are formed deliberately by human intent and process, and that their perception, too, is crafted artificial. Indeed, we may find ourselves tiptoeing towards a second kind of fundamentalism, not functionalist, but materialist. The art historian and critic W.T.J. Mitchell spots this danger when he remarks of what he calls the romanticist interest in materials, that I quote, we are in danger of supposing that somehow this turn to the physical is a tough-minded and realistic gesture, a politically progressive act of getting down to the concrete hard facts, the obdurate stuff of things in themselves, quote, end of quote. Regarding this turn to the physical as illusory, he observes, quite rightly in my view, that the physical is anyway a thoroughly metaphysical concept and that objects only make sense in relation to thinking, speaking subjects. Well, I think he's right. Materials are necessary, but they're not sufficient conditions for the creation of complicated artifacts. We need to acknowledge the power of human intent and affect and the capacity of human beings to think sideways through similarly, metaphor, allegory, and other devices. The materiality of images, as it's often referred to now, is held, I think, questionably to be a fact, not a process, to be a matter of the order of being ontological, not processual. But process, the process of making and realising and also the process of experiencing, is as an inescapable as work done by thinking, is inescapable as work done by thinking thinking subjects. Sorry, that wasn't very clear. It is in this way that we can avoid the materialist trap of essentialising the qualities of stuff and losing sight of the fact that aesthetic experiences adjust that experiences within subjects, not experiences within things. It helps here for a moment to think of illusion. These extraordinary figures are at the vault, at the west end of the nave of the Cathedral of Poitiers. They're great fun. Illusion is art for contrivance, understood as such a pleasurable product of sensation. The basis of the word illusion lies in the Latin noun ludus, luderei, to play. And its character as an experience of artefacts involves regard for fine, subtle and appealing workmanship and the play of artificial effects. It's a form of undeceived depiction. Instances of this are so common in medieval art that it's difficult to avoid them. There's a vast surviving European-wide infantry of medieval ludic effects. These may take the form of a somewhat obvious, but no less compelling, tricks of the eye, such as the sculpted corbels here at Poitiers, consisting of human heads which are later extended in paint with bodies to create the slightly eerie effect of a face emerging from within the stonework like a ghost peering through a wall. However, we need to note a body of modern opinion which states that medieval art wasn't given to illusion or mimesis at all. According to it, illusion and mimesis were the preserve of Renaissance art that deliberately tried to trick the senses while medieval artists stressed instead the objective or material character of art. In her discussion of Christian materiality, Caroline Bynum states, Medieval devotional art is the opposite pole from the art of southern states, southern or northern renaissance that followed it. Renaissance artists aimed for mimetic, illusionistic modes of representation that deliberately tried to trick the senses. In contrast, medieval artists expected viewers to notice and admire the stuff they employed as stuff. Her concern that late medieval art shouldn't be assimilated to a renaissance mindset, the sort of thing that would be, as it were, discussed by Erwin Panofsky, is understandable. According to Panofsky, you will call symbolic Gothic art was eventually freed and elevated aesthetically by contact with the pictorial rationalism and illusionism of perspectival Italian painting. And yet, the underlying polarities and narratives deployed by Caroline Bynum remain exactly those of Panofsky. Even Burkhart. And her alternative idea that medieval art as a whole should be separated from the concept of illusion and return to its material base also has implications. It runs against the extensive evidence that enjoyable illusion, a play with subtlety, craft, visual appearances, surfaces as here, was a concern of medieval art to core. So we're left in effect with the choice of accepting and imposing a renaissance model of illusion or none. Finally, it underplays the obvious materiality of post-renaissance art. Its body of beliefs is founded on an anthropology of medieval images described by Hans Belting, which sees them as images defined functionally before the era of art defined aesthetically in renaissance and post-renaissance terms. The ultimate charge against this form of analysis, I think, is that it's reductive and that in emphasising the speech of materials it demotes human factor, human response and human imaginative and discursive faculty. Nothing in Caroline Bynum's book is said about experience at all. There are a few lines on the perception of statutes but they relate to idolatry. This is one of those horror crosses or the crucifixus dollarosus that emerges in the late 13th century. It's from Wroclawf. They're often associated with the cult of Corpus Christi. This is now in Warsaw. And it's a magnificent instance of the masquerade that paint and plaster engage in. The point of what I just said was to get the materiality of medieval objects into some sort of perspective by pointing up issues of representation and of belief that images are not sanctified by their stuff but by what they show. One point to the difficulty I have in mind is provided by Caroline Bynum's discussion of the theology of incarnation and materiality in her account. Materiality is, so to speak, the flesh and bones of the matter. It's frank, honest, vigorous, or in her words I quote, overt, pregnant with significance, I quote, per se living, unavoidable in the encounter with the thing to hand. Art in contrast is a deception, sophisticated, dead, illusory if it exists at all in the Middle Ages. This view is not without animist sympathy. Bynum says, I quote, by the 15th and 16th centuries, Bynum suggests, there was a growing sense that material objects were not merely labial but alive, end quote. The practical lesson of conventional art history has always been that the materials and media involved are inescapable. That's how I was taught, brought up in the 1970s. We studied materials. The materiality turn is in that sense incomprehensible to me. It's reinventing the wheel. And yet a more or less explicit tenet of the school of thought strongly influenced by Hans Belting's anthropology of images is that art isn't a medieval category but a post-renaissance idea. And hence the common rhetorical ploy of using words such as objects and images in lieu of such words as works of art. Well, I see this as a form of persuasive definition. I kind of object to it, partly because it's central thesis about artifacts and representation seems to be questionable, as I'm arguing, and partly because it isn't clear whether an exacting critical method could ever emerge from such highly generalized and inclusive incarnational ideas from theology itself. Nevertheless, as noted earlier, theology has advanced as a master narrative in virtue of their very materiality, medieval artifacts become objectifications of all the issues inherent in the doctrine of the incarnation itself. And I should add, by the way, that my book is full of praise for Caroline Bynum, too, and I'm afraid I think in this area of study I think she may be erring or creating difficulties which I think are insurmountable. The roots of this whole idea of materiality lie in a seminal text, which will be very well known to art historians, a study of the materiality as cultural history. Michael Baxendoll's The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, published in 1980. Baxendoll's careful account has two features of note. The first is that he insisted on the inseparability of material and skill in observing quite rightly that noticeable art draws attention to itself quite as much as noticeable material. Baxendoll drew attention to what he called a contradiction between the religious image and the most accomplished art that was difficult to evade. Secondly, Baxendoll's account gathered together skill and material under the heading of what he called secular satisfactions. On this basis, art was susceptible to ascetic religious critique. The things that made it theologically correct also made it objectionable. The notion of Christian materiality replies to this by regarding materiality as bearing theological import and so value. To think of mere materiality is to miss the point. Materiality is licit because it is doctrinally not just acceptable but eloquent. This in turn raises two issues. First, as Baxendoll's theory recognised that not all medieval art was explicitly religious, it's just that secular art is often less well preserved than religious art. Critical theories with any claim to general application cannot be developed on the basis of an essentially privileged because well preserved and value body of evidence. But second arising from this is a question about what Michael Baxendoll very interestingly called the character to be respected. I quote character to be respected of materials. Crafting is profoundly material in that it requires strength dexterity and knowledge of the way materials behave when worked and used. In both the verbal and non-verbal arts the craft involved entails a preliminary understanding practical in nature of the character of the materials that form the basis of invention. This understanding entails judgement and experience without some concept of what craftsmen actually do to talk about materiality is merely an abstraction paradoxically. Character, the essential imprint of a material to take the word character seriously seems preferable to the anthropomorphising and emergent notion of personality. Materials need to be sniffed out, touched, read. You remember Baxendoll's discussion of chyromancy you read things with your hand, you feel materials. The material has to be fought through, pre-measured as in the craft of poetry. Medieval poetry and rhetoric made use of the idea that materials have a character or intrinsic power. For example, iron. Iron honours itself in its contentious working and forging. That's an image drawn from the account of dialectic who's a metal worker in Alan of Leall's anti-Claudianus which speaks of the artisan's weapons her conquest of informed material her compelling of stubborn matter to obey her. Think of that word opus super abat material which is a kind of conquest or overcoming word. And yet the human imaginary is inescapable. Materials come ready freighted with signification because their usages are old, often traditional and it's hard to see how their values no matter how various could ever be separated from cultural understanding in so context and in this sense natural meaning unless it is to be reified into something normative always has to content with the complexities of cultural superimposition unless it is to become a form of literalism. This was undoubtedly true of some of the most important language of materials in the Middle Ages as in the ancient world. Materials were not necessarily seen as things in themselves but as things subjected to artifice. They were not seen as something but something was seen in them a distinction I draw from Richard Volheim. Namely a fiction which acknowledged the difference between object and medium. Theology however wasn't central to any of this. Ecfrasis and ecfrastic practice predated Christian belief. What was central to ecfrasis the description of buildings and marbles as if they were edi in currents of water as if they were other materials brought to life, brought to the mind's eye. That process of description ecfrasis was central to what John Mitchell in his wonderful study of marble, reading into marble and the patterns in marble and veining caused the expenditure of imagination that compositorial activity on the part of the beholder which enacted ways of seeing common to images and stuff. I think he's dead right. Well in a memorable phrase which encapsulates part of my objection to the coralling of medieval art into a reductively materialist position Umberto Eco wrote of his to quote him shaggy medievalism capturing an earthy mindset of savagery, barbarity, pain and stupidity. So let us in the final part of my talk this evening let us consider the representation of something that tests all artists which is certainly material and which in theory is easily substitutable and certainly shaggy namely hair. Hair is as much a concern for sculptors as for painters and perhaps more so since of all relief surfaces is perhaps the most demanding and tedious to execute well with the possible exception of foliage we can debate about that but it seems to me that hair is often very demanding. Between the year 1100 and the year 1300 the sculpted depiction of hair went through changes quite as marked as any other representational feature. Romanesque carving was especially alert to hair's eloquence, the astounding figure of Isiah at Suiak in the Dordais here on the screen now whose hair and body seem equally dynamic seem to embody a kind of metaphysical power. The power of prophecy it's interesting in the 12th century in these great portals and cloister figures of the early 12th century in this part of France health and the prophets have amazing hair, extraordinary hair and this kind of talking and I want to talk about the twisting of form. The classicising practices of Gothic art around 1200 tended to reign in the earlier dramatic effects as sculptors began to scrutinise and deploy Roman techniques but a return to the hair as a bravura expressive vehicle long, waving and gratifyingly sensual, curled up, coiled, animated began in the second half of the 13th century along with other changes in figure style at this time in France and in the courtly centres of Europe. As in Romanesque art Gothic hair from 1250 or so onwards became part of a total order of mimesis indeed gained in importance and visibility as the surface simplification of garments into the broadfold style through into relief the expressivity, carefully considered expressivity hands faces and these extraordinary coils of hair and I draw attention to the spiral composition that runs through that particular figure of St John writing one of his letters at the start of the book of Revelation in the Dauce Apocalypse in Oxford illuminated probably in London or thereabouts in the 1260s. Concentrations of bravura, curling, coiling winding and waving hair are typical of this particular period. Well a relatively unexplored aspect of this new and widespread fashion for curls, coils and twists is its relationship to the preoccupation in some quarters with the use of torqued or twisted bodily forms of which a supreme instance are the many figures in the Dauce Apocalypse itself. The waving or curling of hair is a form of surface colouration by line talking or twisting spiralling however was a product not of surface but of the disposition, the design core of a figure running through it in some cases as with Suiac's Isaiah that we saw a moment ago or here the pictures of St John in the Dauce Apocalypse such talking and twisting I think signals spiritual energy, visionary power, the body is a metaphor as it were. Another dispositive aesthetic quality is apparent in the increasingly prevalent S-curve or hip shot core line, a form of contrapostor of gothic statuary from the mid 13th century onwards. It was from this period onwards for example that the image of the Virgin Mary standing gracefully and crowned holding the Christ child became more common and with an S-curve running through the whole form. Waving hair was the surface corollary of this extraordinary structural curving core and yet both created a physiognomy, a look. The most extraordinary instance and this is a real cover girl illustration is the figure of Mary Magdalene, one of a set of saints from the interior of the Collegiate Church of Echwy in Normandy founded by Ancaron de Marigny and completed about the year 1313. This Magdalene, and well I remember the effect of this figure in the Wamodi exposition in Paris you may remember it was at the end of a darkened room pow, wow what an effect it made, magnificent. This Magdalene, if we accept her as the Mary Magdalene, I think we probably have to she's not Mary of Egypt, is as astonishing a conception as any in Gothic art, Mary is barefooted and her pose studedly hipshot or curved, S-curved. She's quite as much a pin-up as the wonderful women we saw in the Choir at Nambog, the wonderful figure of Uta we saw at the start of the lecture. Here, surface itself acts as a collar, I mean collar in the rhetorical sense of the collores and effects that make the figure eloquent, not literal colour, though it may very well have been coloured of course. It's an eloquent intercument, for hair has become more than vestment, the figure is hair, for hair constitutes its physiognomy just as the grin constitutes the Cheshire cat. That the effect of this almost Ovidian metamorphosis is both direct and subtle is clear, the long tooled waves are at once strange and slightly sexy, a 14th century word for them, perfectly appropriate word, but deriving from the Latin word undatus or wavy, was oundie, a heraldic term by the way from, you may recall if you were a herald, the English heraldic term ounde meaning wavy or oundie and people spoke of hair being oundie or wavy. oundie hair creates delight and pleasure, that's central to this. But in the way it insinuates a curvaceous female form beneath, it also warns us by stirring mixed affect within us. She's a repentant sinner, we mustn't have thoughts beyond the pale as it were and yet there she is, both encouraging us and reproving us at the same side at the same time. The modern word usage capturing this mixture is surely kinky, derived from the old Germanic word for curved or bent. The history of the hair vestment or shirt is also at one level frankly an unmistakably ascetic. Yet hair, female hair especially was a common sign of moral ambivalence and the outlandish. By its very appearance the equifigure explores moral aesthetic wandering to the point of near error from which Mary herself, now in exile, is retrieving herself. The sinner is redeemed, error is undone, paradise is regained. And this is all achieved within what WTJT Mitchell calls the linear vortex of drawn desire the spiral curve, the linear S and spiral curves that are often associated with the discourse of desire all the way through to Hogarth the line of beauty think of the wonderful frontispiece to Hogarth's analysis of beauty which quotes Milton the Serpent, Eve, it's all in there. English masons working within the Norman derived thick wall building tradition had long established that complex waving moulded surfaces operated variously and subtly under differing light conditions. Double curved effects such as the sinuous and voluptuous OG curve coming into fashion in English gothic art at the same time as the equi Magdalene may have permitted a form of inflection or literally I think the key word is the insinuation, the creating of little nooks and hollows by waving lines the secret meaning which coloured commissions were then which then coloured commissions. Such things were never formal, they were never rigidly symbolic, the OG was not a gendered form but it was a suggestive form, it was an insinuatory form suitably deployed it might create a feminine touch styles work by means of subtle display rules and what Ernst Gombrich called weighted preferences the word insinuation seems to capture the sense that such preferences are never exactly rule bound but discretionary, occasional analysis reminds us of the danger of attributing specific fixed values to specific forms and quantities. It's all appropriate, it's all proper to the particular form of context or decor of the occasion. The equis I'm just entering the last words of my presentation. The equis equi Magdalene's eloquence of form entails then the kind of thinking about a subject that surely constitutes representation. Viewed from the rear we don't have that, I don't have a side of the other view but she's as weird and wild and abstract and mysterious as a piece of driftwood for a moment her stone in us is irrelevant for truly she's an image, the image of a woman whose own touch was thwarted at the noly metangore. Materiality you see is by and by for material is labile, Mary is all her but she's also all image and it's the image that carries and gets across the values. The point is that in a case such as this a materialist substitution couldn't work. Now you could with her and this is one point of raising here, it's precisely something that could be used in substitutive ways. You could effect it as was often the case in many gothic and baroque images by using real her, horse her or human her. Numerous examples survive of this from Iberia and Germany. Gwis Wunhart, an early 15th century sculptor in this region, commemorated his dead daughter, a nun by using her own hair on a crucified Christ that he had made for her nunnery in a truly sponsorial gesture. Well we can't imagine an image of Mary Magdalene entirely covered in human hair as a sort of substitution to have this kind of effect. Substitution and representation you see are not the same thing and yet I'm afraid in some anthropologist minds they are exactly the same thing. I think this is a philosophical error so to speak. Artifacts don't just illustrate or symbolise to enter into my concluding words. They create experience. If images are there simply to transmit information, to convey doctrine, they become a medium as is often wrongly understood, an undifferentiated transparent vehicle like plate glass without its own agency. This is in large measure because the instrumental outlook of historians of religion and anthropologists, some anthropologists not all, is indifferent to artifice. Artifice takes account of and works in a medium and that medium has itself got agency. True. Materiality study based ultimately on the thinking about medium and the senses explored by Walter J. Ong and Marshall McLern, I'm sure you know who I'm referring to, has had the virtue of reminding us that artworks not only have form but power as materially constituted things. But what it also stresses is that things are not solely apprehended as objects functioning within a deeper context. They are, first, surfaces whose material and stylistic form, idiomatic form, whose shape, whose profile, whose surface, whose working, whose patterning, whose colour, whose look create an experience within their beholders as thinking, feeling subjects. They provoke thought. They are matters of aesthetic attention in the pre-modern sense of knowledge, sensation and experience gathered through the senses and not in the canteen sense of a kind of detached appreciation of something as a thing in its own that serves no end. As Mary Carruthers and C. Stephen Jager in their own different ways have shown non-transcendental, worldly aesthetics are concerned with surfaces, appearances, sense perceptions, experiences. Christian art inevitably has a sensual and surface bound aspect. The rhetorical language and practices of the ancient and medieval worlds preserve large and articulate bodies of discourse about such experience which possess real critical value and acumen. Critical terms are either useful and transformative tools or they are not. It reminds us that some of the earliest and greatest theologians and aestheticians, such as the great hero of medieval aesthetics, the greatest hero, St Augustine, also a retoration by training and, of course, theologian that these people were rhetorically minded. That theology itself was necessarily cast in rhetorical terms. Mary Carruthers says of Saint Bonaventure in the 13th century and of the incarnational aspect of art that, I quote, the joy he describes is not in some meaning he finds in the object but rather the pleasure of the craftsmen in making it and our sensory pleasure in perceiving it. Artists do not imitate the doctrine of the incarnation by expressing it directly but in the ways that art assumes and demonstrates some of its processes. That seems to me a judicious assessment. In their assumption and demonstrative power, in their colour, their sheen and their finish, line and calculation or visual artefacts, whether they're buildings or images, have a powerful latency. They act as forms of figurative understanding which are not just mimetic or symbolic and it's the realisation of that connection created by and within the occasion of the artefact that we take both inspiration and pleasure, meaning, inner sympathy, understanding are not separable from such experience because experience is in part a vehicle for meaning and yet it is exactly the discourse of experience of pleasure as of other sensations that I think has dropped out of our critical language to our cost. Thank you very much for listening this evening. It's the aim of my present work on sculpture to see how that dimension can be restored. That's the end of my seminar paper. Let's see what you have to say. Thank you very much for your time. So, Sarah's got a mic here. Welcome first thoughts and responses or questions to your cause. Following on from what you've just been saying at the end, you think that conceptual art which is, I mean, I obviously can't generalise that much, but some conceptual art is very, to my mind, it's not artistic if you know what I mean. I kind of think you might say from what you, it might follow from what you've been saying that such intellectual conceptual art isn't art, something else. Well, I think Gombrich would probably make that, control that conclusion. I wouldn't because I would see abstract art as an art that's not art. I wouldn't because I would see abstract art as absolutely appropriate to the compositorial imagination of the beholder. It engages us. It engages our intentions. It has intentions towards us. So, I actually wouldn't draw that conclusion. I don't know that it would follow from what I said, what I would say at the point of abstraction. Actually, talking about abstraction, particularly, just very crude. I've just recently went to May I say I've tried to avoid value judgement so I've said I know we don't always succeed but I entirely take your point. I was going to slightly riff on your intervention though, just push it slightly to one side and say that it does seem to me that some of the discussions of materiality that things, while having, we acknowledge virtue and force and power, okay, that actually verges on a kind of abstraction that actually the thing in itself has a certain sort of vitality or vitality of the agency that I can see so far as, well if I may say so also I'm probably the last person on the planet to ask about conceptual art but what is conceptual art if not that which is made up by the imagination, Imaginnatio in the Middle Ages disability to form images is presumably a form of conceptual art because it doesn't have to be mimetic. The key thing about the most vivid images ...yna'n mwynhau amddigol yw Llywodraeth yn ddech待ってu oedd ymddigol... ...yna'n ei ddweud y gael a'r Fawr Fawr, ac mae'r ddweud gan ymddigol... ...yna'n ddweud y gallai'n ddweud, ac mae'n ddweud y gallai ymddigol... ...yna'r ddweud yma wedi'i gweld y cwestiwn. Mae'r ddweud y cwestiwn yw ychydigol yn ddweud maen nhw... ...yna'n ddweud y cwestiwn yw'r ddweud yma... ...yna'n ddweud y maen nhw yw'r ddweud... gyhoedd sefydliadau iawn sydd hwnnw'n dwylo gennych ychydig, a neud yn awdraeth o'r problemau yw hynny, felly rydyn ni'n ehol yw'r cyffredin, llawer. Yn amlwyddiol. Roedd gwneud hynny i chi. Mae'r gwjiadau iawn i'r peiriau amgall wedi gelly, efallach mae'r tyian o'r dwylo'r ingredients. Rydyn ni'n wneud hynny mwyn i'r cael eu gwirioneddol, i neud fwy o ychydig, cael eu cywbwysig â'i rhywbeth yng Nghymru. Mae'r gymhliadau o'r cyfnod yw'r cyfnod os y gallwch chi'n rhan i ystod i gydag y cyfnod yma yw'r rhun o'r amser o'r anghydd yma. Rydyn ni'n cyfnod o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod y gallwch. Dwi'n fawr y gallwch, eistedd, y mirio ychydig ein bod yn cyfnod, y rhan o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod. Mae'r ddechrau, os yw'r eich cyfnod, y deffinisiad o amser oes yn y bwysig? Mae'r ddechrau, rydyn ni'n gweld, mae'n dweud yw'r ddweud. Y dweud yw'r ddechrau, mae'n dweud, mae'r ddechrau a'r ddechrau, rydyn ni'n dweud a'r ddechrau a'r ddechrau, rydyn ni'n dweud. Mae o'ch gweithio, dwi'n dweud, ac mae'n gweithio. I'm... Look, when I say I'm challenging the imminent theory, the animus theory of images, I'm not challenging its existence, of course, we know that there are thousands of miracle working images in MediHall Europe. That doesn't trouble me in the least, and it's not hostile to my argument. My point is that if we adopt as the default position the idea that because it's got a relic in it and it's susceptible to the belief that it might come alive or actually be alive. Os ydych chi'n gweithio, mae gennym ni ddim yn cael ei ddweud y ddweud yn ddweud o ddweud. Rwy'n credu'r corffau ar-fawr. Rydyn ni'n ei gweld â'r ddweud. Rydyn ni'n gweithio. Rydyn ni'n gweithio. Rydyn ni'n gweithio o ddweud â ddweud a ddweud o'r diwyllacedd. Yn cael ei ddweud, yna eich gweithiau sydd o'r functiau sydd yn gyffredinol y ddweud? Yn cael ei ddweud, mae gennym o'r diwyllacedd. Mae gennym eich ddweud yn cael ei ddweud. o'r hyn gyflym eich cynnig o'r ystod amgylch yn ystod hynny, a'r rhaid ydych yn cael ei brofi. Wrth iddyn nhw'n gymryd y gafod hynny, neu i'r llwythau, ma'ch ein bod yn hynny, mae'n hynny'n amgylch yn fawr. Mae hyn o'r bydol gan eich ymddi'r ystod yn dawnodol hefyd. Yma yna, y nefbrodd yn ysgol yng nghymddier rhaid ei brofi angen a'r hyn sydd i'n cyfanyd. A mae'r unrhyw ffordd sy'n mynd i chi. Tyw yw ychwanegol yma.... If I talk about anthropologists at Google hands on such as I'm an anthropologist, I don't agree with that. I don't think we think that at all. So, I don't want to be rude about all of anthropologists. But I am referring to the kind of built anthropology of belting, which I think is functionalist in its core. At least as stated in the works on medieval imagery, which I think doesn't really address the question of... Let me put it correctly, the question of beauty, Mae'r talos a'r ddweud o'u lleiwch yn ymdweud ydw i'r bwysig o'i gorfodol ei fod yn y ddweud, o'u ddweud o'u ddweud hwn. Felly y ffansiwch yn y perthynu a'r ddweud yn y ddweud. Ac mae'n ddwylo diwrnod y gallwch chi'n golygu, mae'n ddau o ddweud i'r ddweud o'u ddweud. A ddweud o'r gweithgaf o'r relic ar y statiw, mae'n ddweud o'u ddweud o'u ddweud o'u ddweud, .. seraig, ond mae yra'r byw hwn er mwynhau i ddweud. Mae eich cael wych? Prydoch yn dda. Fy ffordd mor hwn! Fy ffordd mor hwn, mae'r amhall. Yn y gallu cwriaidd yn nesaf, mwy yn ei dweud eich bod yn ei ddaer. Tyn ni ni'n cael ei gyfnod mi'n cael sianol. wedi cael ei ddigon. Mae'n cael ddigon. P再 ddim angen. Oferch! Hefyd, ychydig chi'n mi. Yn y gallu'r cwysig, timell. llawer, yn y gallu beth gael sydd yn fawr yn cael eu cyhoeddiad ar gyfer dyma'n ei dweud o'r llwyddoedd, efallai hwnnw chi i ddaeth yn eu enghreifftir. Ond y gallu am ychydig ni i'n gofynu werthoedd o'r blaen. Prefawr, y llwyddoedd hefyd, yn ddigonol i weld eu hwnnw. Efallai hwn yn cael bwysig phäm gwirioneddysg am bros colleaguesu, bwrw, ar hyn ar hyn, mynd i chi'n ei ddesod yn yma ychydig y byddwyd iddyn nhw'n i ddifordi'r ffordd ac ni o'n gyll�edd. Yn amlwg, ond rydyn ni'n gweithio. Ond mae'r pryd yn gweithio'n ddweud o'r pryd yn y cwntech. Mae'n gwneud yn y ddweud o'r ddweud. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'n ddweud o'r leisio'n gweld. Mae'n gweld bod yn gweithio'n ddweud o'r ddweud. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'n ddweud o'r ddweud o'r argumentau, a'n ysgrosio ychydig i'r newydd jyndden ni ddigonol gyda chi. Mae'n dda i'r ace. Rydyn ni'n ddweud o'r ddweud o'r leisio o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud, a dwi'n rhaid i'r clywed o'r raddau sy'n rhoi. Rydyn ni'n ddweud o'r raddau sy'n rhoi alu i ddweud o'r raddau, mae'n ddweud o'r rhaid i ddweud o'r raddau sy'n rhoi'r raddau sy'n rhoi. Felly, roeddwn i ddweud ydych chi'n gweithio. Dyma'ch wnaeth y ffordd wysig i'r bwysig sydd yn eu eu cyfres. Pe yw'r sgwrs bwysig, yw yma yn gyfres, a'r Uned Glesiwodd wedi'u ffordd i'r eithaf. Yr eithaf yn perys yn 60 yma, bydd wedi rhoi yma mewn fawr mewn fawr yn eu cyfres, a'i bwysig i'r eithaf, ac roed pan yn fawr... ..sneg, yn rai eich gwahanol, bod ydych chi'n geitio un pwylo'n sy'n adnol. Felly, mae'r r работhynau yn gwneud amddangos bod yn ff crowdd. Najw'r algorithm ychydig yn bach hwn mennw i'r ddweud. Mae'r algorithm yn ddweud rydych chi, elu'r rhaglen yn creu holl rectwch. Felly mae'r rhaglen oherwydd Llyfrif Caerol Gwyll flynyn i hynny yn gennym ond, byddai'n cymryd o'r ysgol. Mae'r rhaglen oherwydd Llyfrif, rhaglen fyddwyd a'r rhaglen oherwydd Lylr. Rydw i'r rhaglen oherwydd Llyfrif, roeddena weithio, they're not writing exactly in the same time. But one is given to the other. Yes, I do take exception to longaine arts' argument not because I think it's wrong but because I think that it's incomplete. It's humanly unsatisfying. I'm not sure he would've disagreed. He's not my father, or my uncle etc. Was a relief. But he was writing in a specific content – historical historiographical, on a spot. That's granted. ..and 혜 appealing to different set of questions I feel. I am very glad that you mentioned it because I talked about Shapiro quite a lot in the first part of the book when I talk about sculpture in public space. There's no question though. I didn't quite understand your first point about Shapiro, you were making a point about function – you said it rather quickly, and I sped there. I think that All Suit Shapiro's essay, his famous essay on the aesthetics of medieval art. On the aesthetic attitude, was written in a specific historical and historiograffical context in which medieval art was denigrated because it was considered as merely function. No, I think that's absolutely right and indeed I'm full of praise for Shapiro. That essay, by the way, is extraordinarily good and it's got to come back into fashion. The point about the essay was that it says you can read Bernard of Clairvaux and the Apologia and this attack on the sculpture in the cloister and conclude that these people are functionalist Philistines or not. But in fact the nature of his critique is not only dressed up in beautiful language rhetorically, it is also a concession of the aesthetic power of these things in creating an experience. Look, I absolutely agree with that. I think that's absolutely right. I don't think we have a difference about that. I don't always agree with Shapiro's conception of public and private space, that kind of thing, where I think he was a little bit too structuralist or a little bit too dichotomous. But Shapiro is easily, I now tell my students when you read the 12th century that one person you read is Shapiro always, of course, because he writes so well and he looks. My key disappointment with modern image anthropology of the more theological kind is that it doesn't look. One image can stand for another and in that sense it's disappointing and humanly unsatisfying. It doesn't address the simple fact, observable fact that these things do look different. And we need to explain why difference arises, not merely similarity. But yeah, thank you. Interesting intervention. I haven't risen to the occasion entirely in addressing it. But may I just say if you go back to Caroline Bynum's book you will see that it is explicitly beltingite, or whatever the adjective is, beltingian. Yes, but still writing completely different context. Yes, yes, yes, yes. In the context of the theology that belting wasn't particularly so interested in, it does to be said. That's right. Quite agree. Can I follow up on one last thought? Who are you addressing here? Are you addressing a generation of scholars, of new scholars, contemporary scholars and students working on medieval sculpture? Who you think are really fundamental, have been either taught or are fundamentally misapprehending the character of Gothic sculpture? Or are you, is there a sense on your part that many of those gathered in this room will be thinking very differently about Gothic sculpture than you do? Because of the training that they've had and the recent historiography of the subject? Or is it that you're wanting to situate your argument in a much longer history? Yes. Look, whenever you put forward a, hence I refer back to my rather exciting sort of blurb for this. Whenever you put forward a positive argument to confirm a position you are always to a certain extent engaging in refutation of other arguments. Arguments are not always consistent and compatible with one another. Who am I addressing? I could say, appalling. I'm addressing in the first instance myself and trying to understand it myself because I think you have to write about things to try to figure them out. I mean, I am, as I come to the end of my publishing career and academic sort of engagement, I am concerned that a certain kinds of, what I'm resistant to as an independent minded person I think is to certain kinds of automatic thinking. That something becomes a kind of norm and that people use, the word materiality for example has become such a, if you dare to criticise material culture or any of these things. You do get long looks from people and in being a little bit perky and resistant to this, I'm a great believer in contrarianism, liberal discussion and difference and that we have to have civilised difference in the academy. Yes, of course I'm arguing against certain positions but I am arguing against them. That's the key point. I'm not dismissing them. I'm saying look, if you believe that, you obviously must believe that this and this is in turn possibly another. The reason I didn't read out the first part is because it contains a fairly sustained critique of the so-called effective turn in the understanding of Gothic and art of this period which is, I'm profoundly interested in affectivity. But I do feel that much of the effective turn has become absorbed into a kind of, what literary critics in the 1980s called expressive realism, that it's based on essentially realist theories of correspondence which entail that because something doesn't look effective now or familiar, that it doesn't obey the cannons of effective content, that it wasn't effective. Things like that where I think it seems to me they're adubious, which have had the very odd effect of stripping affectivity entirely out of much medieval art before the great age of affect which is 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th century. What do we do with Carolingian art and why is it that many of the most effective doctrines were written by the early Christian philogenes and rhetoricians, Gregory Augustine? That's where it's to be found. It's not to be found in representation. So things like that. Now if you say, I remember a conference at the Courtauld Institute about parish churches 18 months ago and during the course of something up I said I'm not really keen on the word emotion. And somebody came up to me after it was berated. He said you don't like emotion, don't like you. And I said no I don't like the word emotion because I don't like the word empathy used in the medieval context because I think empathy is a biological concept generated in 19th century Germany which has been transferred to the middle ages which is an era that doesn't have a concept of the biology working separately from the mind. Sorry, I'm probably wondering now I'm tired. I've had a long day's teaching. But my point is whichever step you take you're going to step on somebody's toes and quite frankly I don't care. I'm just going to say what I think is true and if they've got a better idea let them argue back. But the point is we've got to keep, what do Clifford Gates say these things exist to keep culture moving? We've got to keep culture moving. If we acquiesce to doctrines and I refuse to do that then things just stop and we stop thinking and that's the great risk. Even if I make a complete fool of myself I'll shut up. That isn't a gesture so you have to go to explain. Sorry to do this again but just because you've got this image up here you've shown us all these very beautiful images that are kind of in their presentation aestheticised. You talked about the experience of seeing this at the end of the exhibition. Can I just stop you there? We'll talk about the word aestheticised in a moment. Go on. Is this a conscious thing that you've obviously chosen beautiful images you want to make quite about the objects being beautiful? Well the Langham version isn't particularly the beautiful one is it? No it isn't. It's pretty. Yeah it was once upon a time. Do you think that obviously in presenting these images this way outside of their original context you are underplaying their function? Are you making a visual argument? I presume these images from your book. I'm not underplaying function at all. I'm saying that arguments that are based on function are incomplete. I'm not underplaying them at all. Well then I just feel we're getting back into this old binary that if it's arty it can't be functional, if it's functional it can't be arty. That's good. That goes back to German idealism. I'm trying to get that out of the way. You can have both or there's something in between. Danto was right on that. It was an astute observation. So you're kind of pushing me back into a court painting me into a corner that I refuse to occupy. Look are the images beautiful? You bet some of them are. Absolutely. You're perfectly entitled at this point in the evening to say that I'm a stinky old elitist, you know, a hierarch who's interested in art for art's sake. Of course completely untrue. I mean let's face it, for much of my life I've studied some very beautiful things. Also some quite ugly things too if you will. Well I just want to celebrate these things and get them across. It's all ideology isn't it Tom really? Lloyd. That was wonderful. I was going to ask a question about the 15th century and the types of the day range of the objects that you chose seem, well one, what are your thoughts about the 15th century in relationship to sculpture? Also I think is there something of the kind of prior and gardener rise and fall of the civilization of Gothic England in a way that you kind of, a lot of the images you've shown relate to the kind of age of great church building and follow kind of prior and gardeners like you know everything was great around 1350 and then everything went to. Well I do include some 16th century images. I talk about the great, the book ends with a whole section on death and the macabra and the nature of what, I don't like the macabra it's not a genre. That's one important thing to get across. It ends with the eloquence of particularity, the rhetoric of particularity which is essential to macabra image making I think. I think that's important. So I talk about the great St George and the Dragon in the Storkurkin and Stockholm. I talk about trancytums. I talk about quite a number of 15th centuries. I talk about the wonderful vaults at Ingolstadt where you have timber and you have wood, silver and then you know. So yeah, I mean I have to admit for want of space and my own expertise being what it is, it does kind of taper off a little bit. This isn't a textbook and is the 15th century fairly treated? Probably not, but I don't think the, if I may say so, I don't know that the points I'm getting across are radically different in the 15th, perhaps you would differ. But may I just say that I absolutely don't have a view of the high point of Gothic invention or anything like that. It's simply what I know about. And I feel sometimes it's best for me to talk about what I know about rather than what I don't know about. And it's delightful when you do. I mean this is a conversation we were having the other day about historiography I think that is that these kind of scholastic arguments are associated more with the 12th and 13th century than they are with people having approached the 15th and early 16th centuries. When you say scholastic, which arguments are you referring to? Well let's see discussions of rhetoric or discussions of... I don't think rhetoric is discussed. I think the point about rhetoric is that it is entering, re-entering the critical vocabulary as an antidote to the intellectualised and platonised aesthetics of the 20th century, 20th century criticism. I think that's where it's coming from. Look rhetoric is a set of practices. It's not something that's discussed self-consciously and there is no discourse of this. I know Mary Carruthers has published. She knows about 1350 basically. Well she's a Tourserian remember so she knows most about the 14th century. Many of her sources are earlier admittedly will be typical of the monastic culture up till that period. Yeah fair enough. But maybe somebody needs to write a book about the 15th. One might have thought in a way that Baxentall had kind of done it. But I'm not making, I hope, elitist points exactly about the high age of this and the decadence of late medieval Latin. I've talked about alabasters quite a lot. But not from an idiomatic point of view, but from a materiality point of view. You have another question? I was just wondering if you could explain the geography of your study because you say that you don't consider Italy. I thought it was particularly interesting in light of, you know, you wanted to stand out against Panofsky's idea that you have a teleology and it goes through until you get the renaissance. And suddenly there's this door that opens and you have art and representation and illusion and these wonderful things. That's Panofsky's claim. But it's interesting to think about Panofsky in terms of a north-south divide within Europe. And I thought that's quite an interesting comparison to make between some of the work that you're looking at and the way that you're thinking about the period. And Panofsky's thinking that there is a binary that you can distinguish between north and south. I was just wondering if you could unpack what, I mean, it's all clearly northern Europe that you're looking at. But I was wondering if you could just speak a bit more around that issue and that kind of, if it is a binary perhaps you disagree. Yes I do. I think there's one tradition of Latin letters and the so-called rhetorical principles and practices, if we wish to extract them and talk about them self-consciously, I mean many of the people in Merica are others' work who are cited for Italians. So that first point, second point, the north-south binary is a gift to western critical language of Goethe and the journey into Italy. It goes through the whole Germanic tradition of idealist, romantic idealist criticism that there is this kind of binary. Panofsky writes about it. Do I think it exists? Well of course in a sense it does because nobody can say that Florence is the same as Paris. I do think that Renaissance began in Paris in 1240 and I've argued that elsewhere because I think there are quite reasonable grounds for saying that. One kind of Renaissance. But look, I have studied Italian art. I think it is open to others to open that debate out. One thing I have noticed is that the shorter a book is, the more inclined people are to read it. If you think about it, I said this to my students yesterday, we were talking about Panofsky and I showed a picture of Panofsky in a lovely rough. He dressed up as a Rembrandt figure of the image of the cover of Gothic architecture and scholasticism and I started to talk about scholasticism. You could feel you're losing your audience immediately when the word scholasticism comes in. They cringe. The thing about this book is that it's only 60 pages long. You can read it after lunch. Brightened up, no? And I said that. And I say in contrast my own works were based on the unread because they're so long-winded. Anyway, so I wanted to write a short book and I wanted to keep the object domain focused and therefore I took sculpture as the occasion of the pretext to discuss things that I think are of interest to us. The fact that I'm contentious doesn't mean that I don't think these things are interesting or important or I'm secularising things or denying their powers. But would one say the same about the works of Giovanni Pizzano? Would one say the same about 15th, 16th century? I don't know. But I do suspect actually that what I've talked about are probably much more generally applicable ideas. I wouldn't pretend that that was the case but I think it would be interesting to think about. After all, what applies to one type of representation probably applies to many. And if I am guilty of anything it's actually taking a notion of representation out of modern aesthetics and talking about what a representation is. My only defence is that that's how Aristotle talks about representation. So it's kind of in the system. But thank you, you've made a very good point. I'm very aware of the limitations of my book, temporally and geographically, but one can't do everything. John? That sounds as though it's a prelude to some appalling denunciation. Thank you John, very kindly. This is an image that would never have been seen or an image that would never have been seen in the way that we look at it now. Of course. So I don't know where you kind of pull back from. Yeah, I mean it's always lit. This is a famous photograph. You can't find this by Jean-Gilles Baritsey. It's always the image you see of it in this very striking light. That I admit. Well we know, don't we, that Jules Lubbock and Jacqueline Young and Geraldine Johnson and other people are working on the problem of photography and the perception of sculpture and movement around sculpture and the phenomenology of the movement of the subject around sculpture and the way those things compromise and shape experiences. I can't deny that. On the other hand, I have a budget and I have to get the photographs that I can afford and can find. There are flash lit photographs of this image in Dorothy Gillerman's book on equi. There are photographs of this under flash and as you know flash completely kills sculpture. It completely kills the effect. So did I take advantage of this photograph as it were implicitly? The answer is yes because it allows for me the opportunity of a certain kind of critical engagement that I can see is completely artificial. But then I think all critical engagement is. There is never a natural or innocent occasion for critical engagement in my view. It's always compromised or occasional. I would say. Does that answer your question? I think that's a very nice way to end it. Thank you. Can I ask you all to thank Paul very much?