Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum by Amy Knight Powell (review)

Amy Knight Powell has written a brilliant book, impossible to summarize or do justice to in a short review. Understanding medieval images of the deposition of Christ from the cross as about the deposition of images and hence as evoking iconophobia, she makes the motif of the deposition a corrective to recent emphasis on medieval images either as themselves animated or as objects that point beyond themselves to the divine. In this, I think Powell is correct. Much current art historical writing seems either to assume the sort of response to things as alive that we associate with the anthropologist Alfred Gell and to posit this response as universal, or to fall into the trap of accepting the denial of sacrality to objects put forward by Western theologians building on Gregory the Great’s idea of images as the Bible of the illiterate. Instead, Powell finds in late medieval paintings and ritual objects an absence that prefigures the erasure of images fore-shadowed in fifteenth-century dissident movements and enacted in the Protestant Reformation. Cloths that covered paintings during Lent, the Good Friday ritual of enclosing Christ figures in sepulchers, the empty space in the middle of (on at least one reading) Rogier van der Weyden’s famous Deposition, crucifixes with moveable arms that call attention exactly to their own incapacity to move, the aniconic shroud at the bottom of Mostaert’s Deposition painting, and Holbein’s dead Christ (which offers no promise of reanimation or resurrection)—all are interpreted as the demotion of “the image.”

Each chapter pairs medieval and modern art. Supported by ingenious use of the concept of pseudomorphism, Powell places Hans Bellmer’s dolls, Rauschenberg’s flatbed picture planes, and Donald Judd’s deposition of space itself into productive conversation with medieval materials that “live on” as images exactly because they have never been alive. She thus ends with a plea to let “sleeping gods lie and dead paintings hang”—that is, to allow images to survive as images, mortifying our efforts to break or fetishize them by binding them to us who live and die. All this is masterful. Skillfully and wisely, the argument takes us away from current art historical debate over the “animation” and “agency” of images—debate often reliant on a naive reading either of anthropology or of the work of cognitive scientists concerning possibly innate tendencies of the brain to anthropomorphize the world.

I would, however, like to offer an alternative interpretation. Perhaps the imago deposed or elevated in late medieval painting, sculpture, and rituals is not so much “image” (in the sense of what becomes “art” in the early modern period) as it is body and matter itself. After all, imago was understood by theologians as something ontologically connected to its prototype; aniconic or noniconic ritual objects, ordinary human beings, even verbal metaphors and logical terms (for reasons too complicated to explain here) were imagines and explored as such. The late medieval dissident groups and the Reformation movements Powell sees as iconophobic objected more to the Eucharist (bread and wine as God’s body) and to relics (the ashes and bones of the saints as divine power) than they did to what she means by images. What is demoted in paintings of the deposition, and elevated in those of resurrection and ascension, is not, I think, only images but matter—stuff itself. And to a medieval craftsman, all stuff was creation, ontologically related, however distantly, to the Other—that is, the divine.

To argue for an expansion of Powell’s understanding of “image” is not to reintroduce the intentionality of medieval authors and actors or to return to assumptions about devotional paintings as alive. Rather, it is to note that most cultures (including recent scientific opinion in our own) see human fabrications, humans themselves, found objects, and mere stuff as on a continuum between animate and inanimate. Thus, the basic problem for artists and viewers of...