Bread, Wine, and Money: The Windows of the Trades at Chartres Cathedral. - book reviews

Stained glass, the greatest in quantity durable and brilliant of all forms of monumental painting, is well serv by dint of this broad spectrum of volumes For Lucien Magne, writing upon the art of stained glass in 1885 France could boast sum of two units great eras, the 13th and the first half of the 16th hundred Magne's great eras are exhibited by two standard-bearers for the glaziers' art, Chartres (studied through Colette Manhes-Deremble and Jane Welch Williams) and St.-Nicolas-de-Port (survey by means of Michel Herold). Richard Marks reviews the history of glass from the earliest examples of leaded windows in Anglo-Saxon times from one side the Renaissance and even into the 19th-century revival. The breadth of this research is seconded by Nicole Blondel's convolution on terminology for France's Inventaire General de memorials et des Richesses Artistiques de la France. All these studies are the two limited and enhanced by their formats.

Two important works address the iconography of the cathedral of Chartres. Williams's Bread, Wine, and Money: The Trade Windows of Chartres Cathedral is a revision of her 1987 dissertation already available to specialists (including Manhes-Deremble). Williams's research attempts to present the perspective of those not directly exercising power. She put togethers a discourse to articulate the conflictual situations that affected the windows above a half century of history. In doing thus she tends to view all situations as equal, as if part of a catalogue of conflicts, each conflict demonstrating equally the hegemonic power of a controlling elite above a deprived class. Manhes-Deremble, in a Corpus Vitrearum Etude whirl more simply takes a perceived intention of the "responsables" as the controlling productive strategy for the glass. She dioceses those responsible as the bishops and canons and also "the donors," whom she believes rejoined to the clergy. The clergymen however, she characterizes as having a "new belong to for pastoral work," and she labels the audience for the glass as "the faithful."

Williams's scholarship reveals as tenuous the evidence for the belief that artisans actually donated windows (in the novel sense). She explains the universal as a retrospective application by dint of historians of the later-medieval autonomy of guilds and their veneration of prefer patron saints. By questioning the meaning of representation, her work has deep implications for studies of suppos donor portraits of other classes, for example, those of the Capetian dynasty published through Beat Brenk or Francoise Perrot(1) Williams argues that windows were constructions whereby a self-serving body of ecclesiastics could represent classes over whom they desired ascendency If we look at any kind of self-imaging, especially by dint of a corporate body, we find similar strategies to be an inevitable pattern. We can note in our own modern professional spheres university pamphlets and view books depicting a society of cultural and sex parity. Students of different regions and races are exhibited in ideal mixtures, whatever their statistical ratios upon a real campus. The agriculturists of such publications endeavor to raise the most attractive environment for the real students they see as essential to attract. Similarly, the butchers at Chartres may not have been giving windows freely on the other hand the tithes (in kind or money) extracted by means of the canons to fund the enterprise also validate their labor. Art does not mirror life, however realistically we may interpret the depiction, say, of wine criers, standard of value changers, or a contemporary chase or wake (as in the windows of Saint Eustace or of the Funeral of the Virgin). This is not a real pursue or wake, but rather a construction of signifiers that summon both the mundane and the otherworldly with equal power. It is because art stands outside everyday life that it nurses a dialogue between the desired and the actual.

Manhes-Deremble's overriding pertain to is to explore medieval intellectual paradigms, of the like kind as genealogy, typology, parables, Marian devotion, and the function of dreams and visions. The Joseph window thus becomes an example of dreams, associateed to dream stratagems found, for example, in the writings of John of Salisbury, the classical body of The Dream of Scipio, the depiction of the dream of Charlemagne in another Chartres window, and Martin's vision of Christ returning his mantle. Her wealth of reading of contemporary sources in theology, philosophy, and literature is breathtaking. She addresses the relationship of images to the disclosure of hagiography, lay literacy, and the vernacular, arguing that creative visual narrative lay opened the way for literary innovation, rather than vice versa. Manhes-Deremble's arguments are conceived to validate Chartres as recent coherent, and planned from the opening by a corporate body. In plenteous of the recent analysis of stained glass, of that kind an ordered situation seems atypical. Marks notes in his overview of English glazing practices that "only rarely did churches near a coherent iconographical programme" (p 64) Manhes-Deremble is determined to redres previous scholarship upon the evolving nature of the Chartres's program, concluding that "une pensee directrice s'affirme avec une nettete incontestable" (p 72) level her chapter title, "Du hasard au plan," functions to diminish the importance of a site if it does not conform to a preconceived and imposed object It is predictable, then, that she adopts modernism's validating boundarys of change, originality, and artistic intention. She argues that a "revolutionary architecture supported a abysmal renewal of the art of stained glass" (p 5) "Ideas, themes, and style" were transformed. The true copy bristles with heroizing qualifiers: the "astonishing amplification of the art," the "audacity of the architects," the "flowering of iconography," and "explosion of images." Chartres is lit as a "beacon" in its time. Although Manhes-Deremble directs to facts of the windows' restoration, in particular to the findings of Claudine Lautier and the other members of the Corpus Vitrearum team, she discusses of that kind work only if it leads to "important stylistic conclusions," not as it raises difficult issues of production or intervention above time (and thus of reception theory).(2) The ultimate source of similar coherent thinking on the part of Chartres's original planners, she refer tos is the theme of papal authority as articulated by dint of Innocent III. This she dioceses informing the iconography of Chartres as a graphic visualization of apostolic authority. In this light it is surprising that she does not reply more to Williams's thesis, that of Chartres as an example of hierarchical control