Agency, Visuality, and Society at the Chartreuse de Champmol (review)

Sherry C. M. Lindquist’s Agency, Visuality and Society at the Chartreuse de Champmol offers a new interpretation of art at the Carthusian monastery near Dijon, a building founded and funded by Duke Philip the Bold of Burgundy. While her discussion of the monument relies on published archival and archaeological material, Lindquist contributes new archival research to her analysis of the duke’s patronage and the structure of his administration.

Lindquist’s discussions of the monastery’s materials and patronage set the stage for her analysis of how a wider viewing populace might have understood these works. This issue of public access has indeed been understudied, due to the Carthusians’ reputation for strict isolation, but such access did exist, as Lindquist aptly demonstrates. Her discussion of viewing art at Champmol composes the chapter on “Visuality,” a term coined by Hal Foster to describe the historical interpretation of visual material versus the physical mechanism of vision—not too different from what Michael Baxandall once called “the period eye.” This chapter includes an extremely interesting analysis of stylistic innovations by artists at Champmol. The profound originality of Claus Sluter or Melchior Broederlam has often been presented as a statement of artistic individuality, a reflection of a new Renaissance mentality. Lindquist instead resituates those works within late-medieval thought. Using writers such as Jean Gerson, Christine de Pisan, and Thomas Bradwardine, she focuses on how this new style may have created a feeling of “strangeness” (“estrangeté”) that would have enhanced the impact of messages conveyed by the works of art. In discussing viewers’ reactions to such “strangeness,” Lindquist coins the term intervisuality, based on Julia Kristeva’s “intertextuality,” where the interpretation of any text is affected by the galaxy of texts around it. However, it poses a vexing problem as presented by Lindquist. She seems to assume an idealized viewing audience, one that was proactive in viewing the many different works at Champmol. “As visitors moved through the charterhouse,” she writes, “they were challenged, and perhaps delighted by the ever varying demands on their viewing skills” (p. 154). But the reader wonders whether the average medieval viewer was so reflective and would have seen an entire suite of works in the same interconnected way that an interested scholar does.

The chapter of “Visuality” also posits that the Carthusians and the duke used art at Champmol to remind outside viewers of their separation and difference from the patrons. For example, Lindquist reads the ducal portraits on the façade of Chartreuse’s chapel as a barrier to outside viewers, “like velvet cords at modern historical sites . . . [carving] out an imagined spiritual realm reserved to the ducal sovereigns and the objects of their devotions” (p. 130). But praying patrons appear at the threshold to numerous Netherlandish paintings, and although there can be no argument that “donor portraits” functioned as signs of exclusive hegemonic status, many patrons do imitate the actions of holy figures in the narratives they inhabit, suggesting that they may have served as role models for other viewers. Although the statues of the duke and duchess at Champmol do not imitate other religious figures, it must be granted, given this broader tradition of anachronistic inclusion, that period viewers may not have necessarily seen Philip and Margaret as barriers.

Still, Lindquist’s fine new book posits an interesting interpretation of the relationship between viewers and images in the late Middle Ages, while presenting the reader with a thorough review of the art at Champmol and an important analysis of the bureaucratic structure of ducal administration.