Romanesque Architectural Sculpture: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (review)

As a medievalist, Meyer Schapiro is undergoing a renaissance, not that his contributions to the study of medieval art have ever been without an audience. Perhaps it would be more apt to compare Schapiro to a saint in the art-historical pantheon (not that it is overpopulated) and regard this book as one of an ongoing series of his posthumous miracles. The publication of his Norton Lectures on Romanesque sculpture coincides with that of another series, The Language of Forms: Lectures on Insular Manuscript Art, which he originally delivered as the Franklin Jasper Walls Lectures at the Morgan Library in 1968, the year after he delivered those at Harvard. One is left with the impression of effortless eloquence and intellectual plenitude—and of an endless, evolving fascination with those languages of form that evade definition in terms of classical aesthetics yet cannot be explained adequately, either, in terms of dependence on supposedly normative religious traditions. The only other figure one can think of who focused so systematically on the formal qualities and expressive potential of nonnormative styles is Otto Pächt, with whom Schapiro shared a healthy resistance to the tendency (encouraged by Emile Mâle and very strong in post-Panofskian American art history) to explain medieval images in terms of texts. Even more so than in Pächt's case, Schapiro's scholarship reveals the extent to which it is impossible to write a history of medieval art history without simultaneously considering the history of modern art, as it was being made at the time they wrote and as it was being written about.

As for the Norton Lectures themselves, Linda Seidel's expansive introduction provides detailed documentation on how the published version came to see the light of day so late and places Schapiro's lectures in an incisive historiographical context. Seidel, one of Schapiro's most distinguished successors as a champion of Romanesque sculpture's distinctive qualities, notes that the stresses in his oral delivery "proved especially effective in Harvard's Memorial Hall, where wailing fire engines flew past the busy Cambridge intersection on which the building stands." Teaching as I do in a building that stands just across the street, I can testify that sirens still provide a persistent, high-pitched ostinato. Seidel identifies Schapiro's concern for the "speaking face" of medieval sculpture, and thanks to this publication, one of art history's most powerful voices can be heard again, speaking to us on a subject that prompted many of the intellectual engagements that marked the rest of his career and that continue to shape the study, not only of medieval art history, but also of the humanities as a whole. Seidel speculates that these lectures were not published at the time (as Norton Lectures often are) by Harvard University Press because the photographic apparatus would be too costly or else because the "readership for works on medieval art" is so "invariably modest." If publishing Meyer Schapiro's work was ever deemed too risky an undertaking, then medieval art history is in a parlous state. Indeed, this book deserves a wide readership, and both Seidel and the University of Chicago Press should be praised for making it possible.