Book Review
Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God's Invisibility in Medieval Art
Herbert L. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God's Invisibility in Medieval Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 265 pp.
To recognize that medieval art is complex is one thing, to demonstrate it adequately is another. Despite Kessler's own judgment some years ago that the best recent work on medieval art consists of articles or monographs focused on individual monuments to allow for a consideration of very specific contexts, his own collection of eight essays offers a more synthetic view of a rather essential question. At least once per semester the professor of medieval art is asked by some searching undergraduate: But how could the Christians make art if the second commandment forbids graven images? This, broadly, is the leitmotif that Kessler addresses throughout these essays. Drawing on a vast body of icons, ivories, mosaics, wall paintings, manuscript illuminations, patristic, medieval, and Byzantine [End Page 211] commentaries, these investigations articulate the remarkably intricate ways that medieval art could constitute profound theological arguments about the nature of images as a reflection of Christ's incarnation, the abrogation of the Old Testament, and the relationship of copies to originals. Above all, such art offered the possibility of viewing God through this material medium, though care was usually taken to underscore that God could only be fully apprehended by the intellect. Nonetheless, the power of medieval art to stimulate the (mostly learned) faithful to the contemplation of divinity and of God's role in sacred history is here restored, demonstrating, like the originals under study, how Christian art could show the invisible by means of the visible.
Adam Cohen
Adam Cohen teaches art history at the College of William and Mary and is the author of The Uta Codex: Art, Philosophy, and Reform in Eleventh-Century Germany.
