|
Winner of John Nicholas Brown Prize
The 2009 John Nicholas Brown Prize is awarded to Jean A.
Givens for Observation and Image-Making in Gothic Art (Cambridge
University Press, 2005).
In Observation and Image-Making in Gothic Art Givens addresses
fundamental questions in medieval art and science about
how people perceive the natural world and how they describe
and relate that experience to specific audiences. Moving
beyond outmoded discussions of the extent to which the increasingly
realistic depictions of nature in Gothic art represent a
new "mentality" in the West or judgments equating the extent
of "naturalism" in a work of art to its value as a representation,
Givens instead asks how and why individual medieval artists
turned to nature to convey specific ideas. Examining works
as diverse as carved architectural ornament, manuscript
herbals and illustrated scientific texts, heraldic shields,
illustrated documents (forest and hunting charters, legal
statutes), and cartographic representations, Givens describes
the impulse to depict natural objects realistically as individual
and nuanced responses to various immediate and local experiences
of the artists, patrons, and consumers of these works of
art.
By dealing with such a wide range of images, she takes
us beyond the particular images to a broader experience.
Givens begins with the chapter house at Southwell (Nottinghamshire)
and its well-known and remarkable carved capitals that depict
a surprising variety of detailed and species-identifiable
plants. She contextualizes the decoration of the chapter
house within the lives of the patrons and users of that
structure. She identifies the plants carved in the capitals
and portals not only as biological specimens, not only as
images laden with biblical or Christian symbolic meanings,
but also as objects that had economic significance in the
everyday lives of the upper-class canons of the chapter:
the species of commercial timbers, hedge plants, and crops
that decorated their building also provided them the means
to carry on their religious activities. The plants depicted
in their building had real meaning to the canons, and the
naturalism in the representation of the plants may be seen
as a choice in the artistic elaboration of the building,
a choice responding to a specific local audience.
Givens moves from carvings to drawings, with a close look
at Matthew Paris and Villard de Honnecourt and their depictions
"from life" of elephants and lions, respectively. She addresses
the relationship of language to image and how these and
other contemporary artists used images to describe things
when words did not suffice. This did not lead them, necessarily,
to draw naturalistically, but rather to draw naturalistically
some aspects of their subjects. Words and illustrations
worked together to convey specific information and to create
an image in the mind of the viewer. Givens places the efforts
of Matthew and Villard in the context of thirteenth-century
philosophical discussions of language and signs. She allows
us to see the naturalism that Matthew and Villard sought,
or claimed, for their images as a response to individual
problems, academic, philosophical, scientific, or otherwise.
We come to understand the images as addressing the expectations
and desires of a specific audience. The images were not
as realistic as they could be, but rather as realistic as
they needed to be to convey what the artists wanted to convey.
By describing images as intellectual and artistic choices,
as negotiations between artists and patrons, as discourses
between artists and consumers, Givens provides her readers
with new ways of looking at and thinking about a variety
of medieval images and the relationship of words to images
in communicating information.
Respectfully submitted,
MARGOT FASSLER
KATHERINE TACHAU
ROBERT BABCOCK, Chair
|
|
