Like treasure boxes, each paragraph in Herbert L. Kessler's Experiencing Medieval Art contains tempting gems of description, analysis, and historical framing. Kessler's new reconsideration of the state of medieval art updates his Seeing Medieval Art (2004). Still covering the Latin West in the Middle Ages, his temporal boundaries now stretch from Charlemagne until 1400. Crucially, he chooses to review scholarship from the last two decades (1997–2017). While readers can expect some of the same sources, conclusions, and artworks that were covered in 2004, such as the Bayeux embroidery, new perspectives and discussions of less familiar objects will greet them. One exciting find is a parchment scroll in the Archivio e Biblioteca Capitolare in Vercelli that shows a church ceiling with captioned scenes from the book of Acts; it documents that it captures the decoration before it was to be destroyed and replaced (88n469). Readers will welcome the plentiful definitions of Latin terms and the footnotes that are no longer chapter-dependent. Undergraduate students will appreciate the suggestions for paper topics, and doctoral students will value such an aid as they prepare for their examinations. More advanced scholars may be challenged to produce similarly extensive studies that focus on regions, including non-Western ones.
Though Kessler has kept most of the same topics—matter, making, spirit, book, church, life (and death), and performance—he includes an introductory chapter on the object and reframes his previous concluding chapter on seeing to incorporate all the senses. These additions are in line with one of his overarching aims: to capture sensual experience through both the works’ materiality and their contexts. His goal is not to address medieval viewers’ reception of the works; this he leaves for his reader to uncover, noting in chapter 1 that the appearances and meanings of objects changed if they traveled and were reworked. Rather, he homes in on artworks’ materials, functions, patrons, and placements by other works to offer symbolic readings and to conceptualize what “experiencing” them may have been like, as referred to in the title.
Kessler no longer takes chronological or theoretical approaches but categorical ones that keep objects and objecthood front and center. In chapter 2, “Matter,” he gives metals, gems, cameos, glass, stone, wood, and other materials their devotional dues before briefly discussing how their juxtapositions could complicate artworks’ iconographical messages. Though he says in the preface that he will not deal with architectural history, he presents some architectural examples in chapter 6, “Church,” in which he descriptively tours a variety of ecclesiastical elements, from portals and porticoes, to naves, aisles, and crypts. Instead of reading the church as a book in content and form, in which attention to sacral history led to a spiritual ascent, this new approach frees Kessler to spend more time on interior decoration and to explore other religious spaces as diverse as baptisteries, chapter houses, and dining halls.
As he notes at the outset, the study may not include as many examples of art from the global Middle Ages as current interest in the field would have desired. However, he shows how works, including ancient and Islamic spolia, traveled within the Latin West through gift-giving, plunder, and trade in chapter 1, “Object.” These objects made their way into relics, which in turn would relocate. In this context, he mentions a few noteworthy examples of global art, including a ladle from Egypt and a Buddha from Pakistan that ended up in a Carolingian-period Swedish burial (2n7). On the other hand, after distinguishing between possible collaborators and makers, chapter 3 describes how economic and historical circumstances led to regional specialties. Silk, for instance, had been manufactured in Byzantium, but production moved to northern Africa, Sicily, and Spain; by the middle of the twelfth century, Lucca became a key player in the production of high-grade silk textiles, exporting to Castille, London, and Asia Minor (68).
Recent scholarship has greatly expanded on topics only briefly covered in 2004. In chapters 5, 7, and 9, Kessler addresses much new literature that deals with diagrams, which attempt to explain the complex workings of the brain, body, and theological notions. He examines the clever play of visual puns, word games, and images of acrobats, jugglers, and wrestlers, as well as the impactful drama of automata in chapter 8 on performance.
Sight and the history of seeing continue to rate highly in Kessler's methodology. Chapter 4 treats medieval justifications for image-making. While covering the reciprocity of the secular and the sacred in daily life in chapter 7, he expounds on the depiction of naturalism that was based on observation and ancient sources. There, he also weaves in an exceptionally clear and succinct explanation of extramission and intromission. Questioning whether we see as medieval people did (214n1323), he again examines sight in “Subject,” where he asks how other senses could be instrumental in spiritual meditation or could lure one's attention downward.
The provocative lynchpin in his study is the epilogue, where Kessler carefully considers the continual relevance and encountering of medieval art today. Contemporary artists’ responses to art have been successful in highlighting the site-specificity, performative, multisensory, material, and modern aspects of medieval art. Significant problems left for current scholarship to address are the camera's biased and confining aesthetics, imposed on objects that were meant to act and be acted upon, and the “scholar's tendency to deploy [the camera] in ways that assimilate medieval objects to post-medieval easel paintings and sculptures” (225n1420). Kessler's reminder that objects did not live in isolation should inspire curators to make daring but thoughtful juxtapositions, and scholars researching objects first-hand to consider different possible vantage points for interaction with artworks.
One of the advantages of such an overarching view of Western medieval art, which is largely rooted in extant artworks, is to demonstrate that many characteristics traditionally considered to originate in the early modern period actually began earlier, including the study of perspective. At the same time, many practices continue beyond the fifteenth century, leading Kessler to question whether there is such a thing as “medieval art” (229). Incorporating abundant multilingual publications, this engaging study will serve as an indispensable reference book and catalyst for further inquiry. The figures and plates were well chosen and elaborated on throughout the work. It is laudatory that Kessler made such an encompassing study flow so seamlessly and invitingly.
