The Nave Sculptures of Vézelay: The Art of Monastic Viewing (review)

This study, the author's dissertation, of the nave capitals in the Benedictine church of Vézelay, argues against the thesis that churches of ample dimensions were built mainly for the pilgrimage trade and not for the monks' own devotions. Ambrose argues that Vézelay's nave was constructed as a setting for the regular orthopraxis of the opus Dei.

Ambrose focuses on a few themes, such as decapitation and hair-pulling (his attention to the theme of hair—tonsured among the holy, wildly flying among the demons—is particularly lively), the saints' lives featured in the narrative capitals, and the use of gesture and gesticulation. This latter he identifies as peculiarly twelfth century, and analyzes in terms of speech-act, performance, and theatricality. He notes that forty percent of the nave capitals "feature speech." These represent "carved gestures with communal meaning [which] encourage the viewer to engage in a process of contemplation. . . . The images mimetically reproduced performances within the cloister." "[T]he repetition of a variety of speeches throughout the sculpture of the nave encourages the viewer in a process of comparison and contrast that delimits proper speech" (pp. 33-34). Trying to apply such a fundamentally literary analysis to visual material is a challenge that Ambrose is not quite up to. Much of what he terms "theatricality" and "speech act" is better accounted for using the terms of rhetoric, dialectic, and grammar which lay at the heart of monastic compositional analysis, of buildings and music as well as words.

He is more persuasive in a chapter on the little-studied foliate capitals of the nave, to which he applies an Oleg Grabar-inspired analysis of their role as "the syntactic structures that govern the production of meanings.... The significance of a given ornamental motif resides not within an object, but is performed largely by its audience"(p. 65). In Ambrose's analysis, the viewer's "performance" consists mainly in someone noticing for himself repetitions and variations on themes (such as hair-pulling). He gives short shrift to any notion of pre-planned program in the disposition of the capitals, observing that the masons constructing the nave did so seriatim, placing on the columns whatever pre-formed capitals were at hand rather than carving them in situ. "This representational strategy, which encourages constant metamorphoses in meanings, is particularly suited for the life-long ruminations of a monk" (p. 85). Well maybe. But the formal strategies described, of repetition, amplification, and variety, are not representational but rhetorical. The meaningfulness they convey is not wholly dependent on an individual's mental activities or "performances." The forms incorporate disposition and ductus, those signals and strategies within a rhetorically conceived work which conduct a viewer (or listener) through itself.

This is a thought-provoking book by a gifted young scholar. It deserved better treatment from PIMS press. The reproductions vary greatly in quality, some so muddy that the detail is lost. There are absurd copy-editing errors, many from evident failures to integrate prior corrections. A helpful iconographic catalogue, with bibliography, of the nave capitals is marred by a running head in which "catalogue" is misspelled on the odd-numbered pages. On page 69 we read of "waddle and daub" technique (though the phrase appears correctly on page ix). Earlier on this page a dog is said to "bray" to warn its master—howl perhaps, bark for sure—but bray? And in my copy one bifolium had escaped the binder; fortunately it was still with the book.