Medieval manuscript culture organizes reading as a visual experience. Early fifteenth-century Paris saw a proliferation of luxury manuscripts whose illuminations situate the reader as spectator. Christine de Pizan understood this visual aspect of medieval texts and exploited it throughout her work. The Epistre Othea (or Letter of Othea, dated about 1400) exemplifies the visual potential of medieval literature to enhance the reading experience.
Myth, Montage, and Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture, as a study of this visuality, draws extensively on film theory, which offers critical categories for the structures of spectatorship. The authors argue that premodern and postmodern cultures share a predilection for the cinematic arrangement of knowledge in a montage format. Their book explores the competing models for the study of visual cultures represented by the work of Erwin Panofsky and Aby Warburg and argues that the latter's Mnemosyne offers the most productive method for analyzing the Epistre Othea.
Marilynn Desmond is Professor of English, Binghamton University.
Pamela Sheingorn is Professor of History, Medieval Studies, and Theatre, Graduate Center, the City University of New York.

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A broad multidisciplinary study that uses the Epistre Othea to examine the visual presentation of knowledge

Myth, Montage, & Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture: Christine De Pizan'S Epistre Othea

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By Pamela Sheingorn

University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2003 Pamela Sheingorn
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0472113232

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1 THE CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE - Iconography in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Montage is not only the means of recreating the image of an object or phenomenon in general. . . Only montage is capable of producing a purposeful image.

—S. M. Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage

Despite the popularity of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, its use of classical subject matter in the absence of classical form meant that it would be undervalued by twentieth-century historians of medieval art. Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, for instance, established a hierarchy in which the “best” art was classical art—that which united classical form with classical content—the next best employed classical form without classical content, and the least valued used medieval form to convey classical content. In their 1933 essay, “Classical Mythology in Mediaeval Art,” they construct themselves as spectators, watching the historical reel of the classical tradition unroll in a predictable cinematic plot:

[I]n the period generally referred to as the high Middle Ages, the illuminators ceased their faithful imitation of classical models and developed a new and independent manner of seeing things. Transforming the ancient prototypes in such a way that they became almost unrecognizable, they decomposed the representational tradition of mythological figures. Figures which were meant to represent Orion or Andromeda no longer looked like the Orion or Andromeda of classical times. Thus, like the unfortunate lovers in a moving picture who await their reunion, classical subject matter and classical form were separated.

This cinematic analogy casts the Middle Ages as the villain who obstructs the desired reunion of the pair that Panofsky and Saxl liken to the “unfortunate lovers in a moving picture,” classical subject matter and classical form. Panofsky and Saxl’s movie has a happy ending in the return to “representational tradition,” an ending that privileges the Renaissance for its reintegration of classical subject matter and classical form. But what if we interrogate the conditions of the visible within this cinematic experience? What are the cultural norms implicit in this moving picture? To pose these questions is to take Panofsky and Saxl’s reference to a moving picture as more than an analogy and to thereby inquire how the experience of early-twentieth-century cinema shaped their understanding of visual cultures.

Panofsky and Saxl describe medieval representations such as the Othea in the language of destruction, deprivation, and decomposition. These judgments betray a Eurocentric and orientalist perspective that was standard for their time. Such a perspective is evident, for example, when they describe an astrological image of Hercules as “a peculiarly degenerate descendant of the widespread Western tradition,” or when they observe that such “degenerate Western types persisted and sometimes . . . interbred with Oriental types.” In his influential study of classical mythology in medieval culture, originally published by the Warburg Institute in 1940, Jean Seznec articulates a similar hierarchy of values: “Italian art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries invests the ancient symbols with fresh beauty.” To privilege the Renaissance in this way is to reify both the ancient and Renaissance worlds as pure, uncontaminated cultures. In this model, classical Greece and Rome are seen as the high points of Western civilization, against which the Middle Ages is measured and always found wanting. But a text such as the Othea, which (in Panofsky and Saxl’s terms) uses medieval form to convey classical content, offers an instructive exercise in cultural hybridity and, as such, challenges the assumption that Renaissance styles constitute the privileged vehicle for classical subject matter.

In their “moving picture,” Panofsky and Saxl overlook the hybridity of the visible. Their notion that the Renaissance revives classical content creates a Eurocentric trajectory that allows early modern Europe to participate in the perceived greatness of the classical Mediterranean world. However, the very category of the classical Mediterranean world does not hold up under scrutiny: much that is classed as Greek and Roman matter is actually drawn from the African and Asian cultures with which ancient Mediterranean cultures interacted. Nothing exemplifies this better than the discourse of astrology, a Late Antique episteme that conflated classical mythology, star study, and aspects of Eastern religions. Since the Othea recasts the visual and textual traditions of astrology as part of its mythic framework, scholarly response to the illustrated manuscripts of the Othea offers a case study in the politics of the visible within the cinematic regimes of early art history.

Panofsky’s Gaze

For Erwin Panofsky, often called the “father of art history,” early cinema, especially Hollywood cinema, set the conditions of the visible. Panofsky frequented the cinema from 1905 when he was thirteen, and throughout his career he repeatedly used film to “think with” in his art historical writing. His experience of the cinema helped to shape his formulation of iconography as an art historical methodology. Panofsky’s iconographic method—within which, for the purposes of this book, we include iconology—posits a historical subject whose memory is saturated with visual images that function within a semiotic system. Iconography assumes that symbolic meaning assigned to images can and will be uniformly decoded within a culture; the task of the modern scholar is to rediscover these symbolic meanings by surveying enough examples to establish that a specific image recurs—a survey dependent on photography—and by finding literary sources that reveal its meaning. The scholar traces the signification assigned to those images within a visual tradition. The elaboration of the iconographic method signaled a methodological shift in the study of visual cultures to a paradigm that capitalized on photographic and cinematic technologies and adopted their construction of the viewing subject.

Panofsky was a cinemagoer before he was an iconographer, and he interpreted premodern visual culture “as he was habituated to look on figures and narratives in films,” Willibald Sauerländer observes. In his single essay on cinema, the ludic paper “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” first published in 1936, Panofsky considers the place of cinema in relation to the arts of the past and to his own culture. Troubled by expressionist and abstract forms characteristic of modern art, Panofsky sees film instead as the legitimate heir of premodern art. The two forms—film and premodern art—share the representational quality essential for the application of his iconographic method. Regine Prange explains, “Panofsky recognizes narrative film as the only legitimate descendant of traditional fine art primarily because it remains semiotic, illustrates speech and action through images, and thus allows iconographic decoding.” The semiotics of the medium depends on what he calls “movie iconography”—something that “from the outset informed the spectator about the basic facts and characters” (112). In addition, his essay displays an awareness of the power of film as visual discourse to shape the subjectivity of the viewer: “it is the movies that mold, more than any other single force, the opinions, the taste, the language, the dress, the behavior, and even the physical appearance of a public” (94). According to the most recent editor of “Style and Medium,” Irving Lavin, this essay has been reprinted at least twenty-two times and is Panofsky’s most popular work. “Style and Medium” helped to shape early film theory and remains a silent inheritance in film studies. This essay has been much less frequently acknowledged in art historical writing, perhaps due to the disciplinary exclusion of film theory from art history proper. As Thomas Y. Levin comments, there “has been—until only very recently—a virtually complete lack of serious scholarly work on Panofsky’s film essay in the art historical secondary literature. While this is perhaps to some degree a function of art history’s longstanding resistance to the cinema, the failure to engage an analysis of cinema from well within the art historical ranks is curious indeed.”

Panofsky’s essay on film not only allows us to examine the role of the cinematic experience in the structures of art history, it also locates that experience in a historically specific contract between viewer and filmic image. In this respect, Panofsky’s description of his early experiences of the cinema exemplifies how film activates “modes of embodied existence,” in Vivian Sobchack’s terms. Drawing on his early filmgoing at the turn of the century in Berlin, Panofsky characterizes the moviegoer as an implicitly male consumer of “mildly pornographic” images who frequents “small,” “dingy” and “faintly disreputable” “picture theaters” (93–94)—a coded reference to the cinema’s location at the outer boundaries of bourgeois respectability. This description of “going to the movies” resonates strikingly with an experience Sigmund Freud describes in his attempt to define the “uncanny.” Freud narrates his experience of finding himself lost in the red-light district of an unfamiliar “provincial town in Italy” whose inhabitants took him for a potential client despite his conscious resistance to that construction of his identity. His very presence in that space implicitly defined him as a consumer of commodified sex. Panofsky’s experience of cinema marks a similar encounter with the uncanny; yet whereas Freud flees the sexworkers and their district, eschewing “voyages of discovery,” Panofsky enters the movie house and relishes “the unique and specific possibilities of the new medium” (96), a constitutive element of which, as he repeatedly emphasizes, is pornography. Early cinema, in its visual obsession with bodies in movement, put the female body on display to such a degree that “fetishism and voyeurism gained new importance and normality,” as Linda Williams has shown. Throughout “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” Panofsky claims that a “pornographic instinct” (95) is a central element in cinema; he notes that pornography is a “primordial archetype of film production” (96) and one of the “most important folkloristic elements” (104) of cinema. He thus unwittingly celebrates the historical moment that Williams has identified as the intersection of “science and perversion.” Panofsky’s assertions regarding the pornographic contract in the cinematic experience have proven influential: thirty years later Stanley Cavell essentially repeats Panofsky’s formulation when he writes that “the ontological conditions of the motion picture reveal it as inherently pornographic.”

For Panofsky, the social conditions of the cinema work to shape its aesthetic possibilities and limitations, as the following anecdote from “Style and Medium” illustrates: “I remember with great pleasure a French film of ca. 1900 wherein a seemingly but not really well-rounded lady as well as a seemingly but not really slender one were shown changing to bathing suits—an honest, straightforward porcheria” (95). The philological glee evident in Panofsky’s choice of the Italian term porcheria in place of its English equivalent—filth or smut—gives a European flair to the enjoyment of “mild pornography” and serves to place it beyond critique. This comment also constructs an insider language for Panofsky’s learned male audience while simultaneously displaying his elite training in philology. Panofsky’s identity as a philologist emerges from the educational environment of the all-boys Joachimsthal Gymnasium he attended during his adolescence; in a reminiscence he celebrates the homosocial ethos of his training in philology:

The typical German “Gymnasialprofessor” is—or at least was in my time—a man of many shortcomings, now pompous, now shy, often neglectful of his appearance. .. . But though he was content to teachboys rather than university students, he was nearly always a scholar. The man who taught me Latin was a friend of Theodor Mommsen and one of the most respected Cicero specialists. The man who taught me Greek was the editor of the Berliner Philologische Wochenschrift, and I shall never forget the impression which this lovable pedant made on us boys of fifteen when he apologized for having overlooked the misplacement of a comma in a Plato passage.

Panofsky evokes the study of classical philology as a “performance of masculinity,” an elite same-sex educational training that authorizes his homo-social enjoyment of what he celebrates in film as “honest, straightforward porcheria,” a usage that objectifies the female body and expresses a distaste for female sexuality in the guise of appreciation. More significantly, Panofsky’s insistent characterization of film as “mild pornography” can be read as a case study of pornography as a form of sex discrimination, a formulation of Catherine MacKinnon’s that Frances Ferguson has extended to consider how pornography restricts access to “value-altering groups” when it “uses an image as a conspicuous expression of the difference between parties who view it.”

The visual dynamic celebrated by Panofsky for its potential to articulate a gendered and erotic experience of difference has a long history in the West; indeed, this dynamic is evident in early modern exercises in perspective. For instance, Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut of a draftsman peering through a reticulated net at a reclining, nude female shows the erotic potential of perspective as a methodology (fig. 1.2). A woodcut illustration in Dürer’s instructional manual, A Course in the Art of Measurement with Compass and Ruler (Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt), occurs in a section that describes devices for rendering a three-dimensional form accurately on a two-dimensional surface. Of the two woodcuts on one page, the first depicts the use of a glass plate apparatus and the second introduces a mechanical drawing aid originally described by Leon Battista Alberti and recommended by Leonardo da Vinci. In the upper woodcut, the draftsman is tethered to the wall by the string attached to his sighting device, which he must hold in position with his left hand. Because the glass plate provides the surface for inscription, his range is further limited by the length of his right arm. In the woodcut, the artist’s cramped position is emphasized by the crowding of artist, apparatus, and the object being drawn, a ewer, all into the left half of the illustration.

By contrast, in the lower woodcut, the male artist sits comfortably, his arms resting on the table as he renders a perspectivally correct drawing of a woman who lies before him nearly naked, a swathe of drapery loosely folded over one thigh. The expansive space is equally divided between the artist and the model; two wide windows offer vistas onto a natural landscape. The frame of the reticulated net, which allows the artist to accurately portray the woman, also establishes his distance from the nude model. The text between the two woodcuts describes the features of this apparatus; it emphasizes that the artist should arrange the model’s body and then sight through the apparatus to be sure that the pose suits him: “arrange the body in a way that pleases you, so that it lies correctly according to your desire” [besich das Corpus wie es dir gefall / und ob es recht nach deinem willen lig]. The gendered representation of male artist/female nude in the lower woodcut emphasizes the scientific possibilities of the reticulated net by contrast to the glass apparatus above. Under the aegis of perspective, the artist achieves a distance from the model that makes him at once an “objective” observer and a voyeur.

Charles Musser has contextualized cinema as a form of “screen practice”; this aspect of cinema has long been thought to have essentially evolved from perspective. In his attempts to define cinema André Bazin states that “the decisive moment undoubtedly came with the discovery of the first scientific and already, in a sense, mechanical system of reproduction, namely, perspective: the camera obscura of Da Vinci foreshadowed the camera of Niepce.” Carl Landauer points to perspective as a critical category for Panofsky, who “defined the Renaissance by its own invention, the development of visual perspective in the arts.” In his discourse on film, Panofsky situates himself as an embodied male spectator, much like the draftsman in Dürer’s woodcut. For example, in order to illustrate iconographic types in film narrative, he is given to assertions that identify the female by her possible sexual roles in the patriarchal economy: “the Family Man could not but yield, however temporarily, to the temptations of the Vamp.” The moviegoer, constructed to identify with the Family Man, yields to the seductions of film. As Panofsky indirectly reveals, the consumption of the visual in the cinematic space is simultaneously the consumption of a commodified sexuality: as “commercial art” the cinema is “always in danger of ending up as a prostitute.” Panofsky sees the moviegoer as a male heterosexual consumer of gendered and erotic images; his understanding of film does not allow for a spectatorship outside of the regime of heterosexual perspective.

In his jubilant approach, Panofsky sees cinema as plenitude; by comparison, Walter Benjamin’s anxious essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” meditates on cinema as lack and loss. Unlike Panofsky, Benjamin laments the technological advances in photography and film that made the age of cinema possible:

Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that . . . permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it had also captured a place of its own among the artistic processes.

Benjamin’s politically motivated resistance to mechanical reproduction exposes the extent to which Panofsky was shaped by such technologies, specifically the electric light lantern—the precursor to the modern slide projector. Like cinema, the electric light lantern depends on projection for its effect. In fact, early screen practice juxtaposed the two technologies since magic-lantern shows often accompanied early film showings.



Continues...

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Excerpted from Myth, Montage, & Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture: Christine De Pizan'S Epistre Othea by Pamela Sheingorn Copyright © 2003 by Pamela Sheingorn. Excerpted by permission.
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