Beyond the Text: Franciscan Art and the Construction of Religion ed. by Xavier Seubert and Oleg Bychkov (review)

Though medievalists have been exploring the cultural implications of the efflorescence of the new mendicant orders in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe for a hundred years and more, much important and exciting work still remains to be done. That is perhaps the first lesson taught by the welcome collaborative volume entitled Beyond the Text: Franciscan Art and the Construction of Religion, edited by Xavier Seubert, OFM and Oleg Bychkov.

Francis’s religious vision was radically evangelical precisely in the sense that it was founded in a reading of the gospels: hisreading. But we must not forget in our enthusiasm that it was not the only possible reading. Such anti-mendicant writers as William of Saint-Amour (author of the De periculis novissimorum temporum) also wrote out of a reading of the gospels. Unlike many of the great figures of medieval religious history, Francis has left us no discursive or academic biblical commentaries. We are left to deduce his own “hermeneutical principles” from a body of text in which traditional models of ascetic legislation have been enriched and greatly complicated by literary impulse: the selection of gospel texts that seem to have for him a particular personalsignificance, and which he tends to elaborate with a distinctly pictorial and poetic imagination. The inevitable tension within early Franciscanism, which had manifested itself in obvious ways even during Francis’s own lifetime, has been subjected to a probably inevitable oversimplification. “Mal vedemo Parisi,” writes Jacopone da Todi, “che àne destrutt’ Asisi!” More modern historians glibly talk of “Spirituals” and “Conventuals” as though dealing with rival soccer teams. It would not deflate the discourse to speak of a conflict between poetry and prose.

Some such concept seems implicit in the title of this excellent anthology. Jacopone went on to specify just how the Parisian theologians were “destroying Assisi”. It was col la lora lettoria, textual exposition. Beyond the Textpoints in a another direction. For one of the commonplaces of medieval pedagogy was that teaching could be conducted by twomeans: by words, and by pictures. According to an ancient saw not yet obsolete, a picture is worth a thousand words. What is “beyond the text” for Seubert and Bychkov is pictorial art.

The phrase “Franciscan art” is of course rather ambiguous. Does it mean art produced by Franciscans? Or forFranciscans? Or “inspired by” Franciscans? Or is it proper to investigate a rather vaguely defined Franciscan style or “spirit” in medieval art? The scholarly answer has implicitly been “all of the above”. Of identifiable medieval Franciscan artists there is none so famous as the Dominican Fra “Angelico,” unless we count Francis himself. If I am right, the little picture he scrawled on the chartulafor Brother Leo reveals an iconographic complexity and sophistication overlooked for several centuries. But there were, and are, others. One of the more surprising essays in the collection (“A Byzantine Franciscan and the Coincidence of Opposites,” by Robert Lentz, OFM) is from the hand of a contemporary icon painter. Of art produced forFranciscans there is by contrast a very great deal. The proliferation of Franciscan churches was for a century and a half practically explosive, and many were richly decorated, including famously the church at Assisi itself. Art inspired by Franciscans is to be found in the illustrations of many medieval texts. Important work by such scholars as Hans Belting and Rona Goffen typifies the art historical approaches that have so greatly illuminated the concept of “Franciscan art” in this sense.

Beyond the Texthas an ambitious and integrative goal. Its signal originality is the manner in which it collates the work of serious and accomplished art historians with that of serious and accomplished theologians and religious historians. Notable among the first group are the very senior scholars Irving Lavin and Marilyn Lavin, among the world’s most prominent...