The carved foliage that creeps into many thirteenth-century cathedrals does not go unnoticed, but it tends to lose the admirer's attention to competing elements, such as soaring vaults, polychrome statues, and colorful windows. The foliage is nonetheless strangely ubiquitous. It concentrates in friezes that encircle choirs and line naves, particularly in great cathedrals like those at Chartres and Amiens but occurs also around portals and elsewhere. Alert to this frequency, Mailan S. Doquang sets out to understand these friezes’ role and the greater meaning they offer to our understanding of the ecclesiastical environment.
The book's introduction brings into focus some of the reasons for the friezes’ general disregard in the historiography. Scholarship has historically favored style and taxonomy, whereas a perspective rooted in contemporary concerns should open up new understandings. The friezes are not the product of direct observation, says the author, but are heavily mediated, “belonging both to the exterior world of nature and to a preternatural realm in which nature is subsumed by artifice” (37). Taking as a prompt Bernard of Clairvaux's statement that “one learns more between the trees of the forests than in books” (21), the author shows that this artifice intruding onto impervious masonry reveals a rich discourse on nature.
Chapter 1 introduces church sites in which a foliate frieze figures prominently, moving from twelfth-century Burgundian examples to Rouen's Saint-Maclou (though throughout the study Amiens remains a touchstone), surveying their use inside and out. The author discusses the ways a frieze could mark out space, particularly the sacred space of choirs but also of the church more generally. The consecration rite, with its practice of delimiting space and enacting purification, “sanctified” nature on its walls. The carved foliage nonetheless maintained its putatively mimetic relation to nature outside the church walls, establishing a persistent presence of the nonsacred world. This interior/exterior dynamic sets up much of the discussion that follows.
That opening chapter also reveals some of the approach's less tidy components. The existence of geometric, rather than vegetal, friezes at some churches could suggest that friezes were primarily aesthetic and part of architectural vocabulary, and that the motif, whether foliate or geometric, was secondary. The author also attributes foliate friezes around portals (as in archivolt hoods or voussoirs) to the same space-defining quality as those in a nave or choir. Elsewhere the author suggests that the toric form of a vegetal voussoir at Autun is more or less the same as a linear choir frieze that separates the interior's upper and lower stories. Autun, in addition, transforms a classical architectural form and makes it vegetal, whereas Amiens introduces a frieze into what otherwise would be a simple masonry course (really, a molding). Doquang is aware of these issues and argues attention to differences is the key to unlocking their meaning; she argues furthermore that exterior and interior friezes act to draw the spaces together, connecting them in a “deconstruction” of the interior/exterior dynamic (71).
Each of the subsequent chapters takes up a particular aspect of that dynamic, each chapter building on the others to produce rich associations. Chapter 2, focusing on sacred space, elaborates on the organic quality suggestive of paradise. The church was God's bower, after all, and the author emphasizes Theophilus's description of the church interior as “paradise of God, blossoming with flowers, plants and leaves” (73). The imagistic metaphor invites connections between the architectural, material entity and its paradisiacal insinuations, such as how the foliate frieze brings the architectural structure into a meaningful relation with the Garden of Joseph of Arimathea and the Tree of Life. The biblical, and often eschatological, associations further draw the terrestrial structure into the realm of the celestial and thereby lend the church a role in connecting the fall to the restoration of paradise. Even if in all likelihood Theophilus's mention of leaves and plants was meant simply to carry forward his metaphor rather than describe an interior—and spiritual paradise need not be leafy, as Suger reminds—the chapter forcefully engages associations with the architectural setting. Though the idea of the heavenly city is mentioned only in passing, there is no reason to think that the two metaphors—one urbane and the other rural—could not have offered contrasting reinforcement.
Christ's proclamation “I am the true vine” (John 15:1) grounds chapter 3's discussion and serves to draw out connections between vegetation and Christ and, ultimately, the Eucharist. Portals receive special attention here, including the St. Firmin and St. Honoré portals at Amiens, which provide particularly persuasive examples, in very different ways, of vegetation connecting outside and inside. The portals also draw vegetal forms into relation with figural sculpture, their proximity enhancing the already wide-ranging vegetal discourse in relation to iconographic themes, both biblical and hagiographic. This chapter also develops an argument for experiential interpretation, drawing out kinetic-based considerations in the construction of meaning. At Amiens, for example, the heavily Christocentric use of grapevines on the outside encourages visitors moving to the interior to attribute the same Eucharistic meanings to the nave's non-grapevine vegetation.
Chapter 4 returns to the theme of the vine to explore its role in the Solomonic Temple. Flavius Josephus had described the temple vine that contributed to the identification of the terrestrial church as an instantiation of biblical and also celestial sacred space. The author, however, also draws the association into contemporaneous resonances, particularly across geography. The thirteenth century saw heightened perceptions of the East, notably through the Crusades, marked by the “discovery” of the Dome of the Rock and its mosaic vines. The increasing ideological view that posited France as a companion to Jerusalem favored the “exportation” of the Holy Land's sacred vines into France's analogous church temples, like Reims and Amiens.
A brief concluding chapter, while underscoring these themes, also leaves the reader with tantalizing suggestions on the sensory implications of “real” plants’ introduction in sacred architecture. This idea, as so many others in these stimulating pages, should encourage further explorations of the organic in medieval visual culture. Well written and persuasively argued, The Lithic Garden succeeds in bringing thoughtful, sustained consideration to an often overlooked, yet staple, motif in medieval architectural decoration.
