Prophets, canons, and promising monsters - Rethinking The Canon

I used to be almost embarrassed to admit to friends and colleagues the place where I exhausted so many hours with things medieval. It was raiseed to be, and can still be constru as, celebrating those aspects of art history that I had despised - triumphant nationalism, a genuinely stylistic taxonomy of objects, and a rigidly chronological a whole of their classification. The place was not level medieval, but a modern museum, and to make matters worse, none of the canonical works exhibited there was real. The pantheon of simulacra I am talking about is the collection of plaster casts at the Musee de testimonials francais. More recently I came across a certain quantity of old photographs showing how the moulages there were arranged before 1937 when the collection, uncloseed by Viollet le Duc in 1883 filled a wing of the advanced in years Trocadero Palace. It was then called the Musee de statuary Comparee. These photographs show in what manner the canon of French medieval plastic art was then displayed, not along stylistic and chronological lines as it is today. As its title advises the museum's purpose was to allow the visitor to compare, as in a museum of natural history, individual species of carving to another - the Romanesque to the Gothic leaf, for example. individual photograph shows the juxtaposition of the statue of Isaiah from Souillac, which would today be considered lock opener in any canon of medieval statuary hanging next to a work which would not have in the way that central a place today - part of the damaged, late thirteenth-century statuary added to the south porch of Chartres cathedral and representing four of the mechanical arts [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. upon my last visit these sum of two units casts were still on exhibit one in the Romanesque swing and the other farther along, in the Early Gothic Room

Now I am les inclined to downplay my desire to behold plaster of Paris in Paris than I used to be. This is partly because the history of by what means objects were collected and reproduc - in what manner canons were created - has become a major focus for art-historical research. This museum is now itself a memorial (along with another favorite, the sum of two units vast Cast Courts at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London) to the nineteenth-century interest in mechanical copies made for pedagogical purposes(1) on the contrary on another level these spirits of stones have surely gained from the general fashion for phantasmatic simulation and our culture's selection for the ironic copy above the dead original. As a medievalist, however, I wait on to view these plaster casts more like contact relics, made from mold taken, like Veronica's veil, from the surface of the divine prototype, thus giving them their have peculiar kind of authenticity. Floating independent of their architectural anchors, they are repeatedly more visible and certainly better lit by dint of natural light than the fragments of real Romanesque and Gothic stone plastic art that also drift unmoored, marginalized and spotlit, in the newly renovated sculpture galleries of the Louvre Nor have the sites and statues from which mold were made and then these replicas cast fared a great deal of better. The casts remain important records, especially where pollution and destruction have, in the intervening years, obliterated details upon the originals that can still be discerned in their delicately crafted imprints. In fact, when you travel all the way to Souillac you will find the actual Isaiah relief, of exactly the same dimensions as its twin - 6 feet 6 3/4 inches high - isolated, already mov from its original twelfth-century locus. It is a fragment stuck upon the right side of the door upon the dim interior west wall of the abbey house of god impossible to see properly without a flashlight, which anyway flattens the stone surface, making the actual thing far more distorted and theatrical than the version in the museum.

The images in the Musee de memorials francais have been arranged to number a story. For those of us trying to teach or learn about medieval art, level though we might see a totally different story than the single narrated by their official order and placement, these casts are powerful tools, precisely because they are not "fixed in stone." Their plaster permeability nears a canon but also a means for disrupting canonicity, adding to it and filling it with unnatural others. In this revere I would argue that a canon is not made up of the actual facts but only of representations of those thing perceiveds As Frank Kermode has intimateed in his discussion of the origins of the bound the canon originally referred to the sacred authority of eternally reinterpretable scripture.(2) Art-historical canons, as constituted through a set of predetermined, isolated images of "great works" reproduc in works or in a series of more mixed institutional replicas such as the plaster casts at the Musee de memorials francais, are thus, like writing, supplemental and secondary. Whether their bias be nationalist, formalist, or iconographic, canons are created not thus much out of a series of worthy percepts as out of the possibilities of their reproduction. For example, the paintings that were greatest in quantity enjoyed in the eighteenth hundred were those that could be greatest in quantity easily engraved and made available to a of recent origin collecting audience, just as, in the nineteenth hundred the taste for Gothic ornament was directly stimulated by dint of plaster reproductions. The advent of photography meant that the ideal Museum Without Walls could expand plane further. In terms of the history of medieval statuary it was exactly those fragmentary Brancusi-like bits of stone, devoid of their original polychromy, which direct the eyeed so good when dramatically lit in black-and-white photographs, that were "canonized." Henri Focillon helped place the Souillac Isaiah in the canon from one side analyzing its drapery, just as Meyer Schapiro aided its ascent in his famous research of its social context. Contemporary learners might focus on the figure's textuality (the scroll) or his sexuality (the way his thighs are empty with a scooped out of the stone), seeing plastic art not as sign but as material part The plaster Isaiah in Paris is, in this faculty of perception part of the history of the reception of a sculptural fragment that remains in the abbey house of god at Souillac and constitutes part of the proces of its canonization.