Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art: From Early Christian Times to the Thirteenth Century by Adolf Katzenellenbogen (review)

REVIEWS text. To an account of the subject matter of a courtly love complaint we find added a parenthesis: "(No, it is notsillier than other songs: wait.)" (p. 43). I am not entirely sure what kind of audience, apart from one he had no knowledge of at all, Howard had in mind. "Well, perhaps it just came out funny," he says (p. 271), of a line in The Knight's Tale, as if he were addressing an audience of children. The frequent presence of the abbre­ viating apostrophe ("As we've seen ...") suggests a striving after a collo­ quial mode of address, as does the frequent buttonholing of the reader: "youcan believe, if you want, thatshe had been hismistressbefore hersister had" (p. 342). I suspect that this loose, slipshod, unbuttoned, carpet­ slippered style is intended to create a certain intimacy. It does not succeed. The book does not fulfill the high hopes that were entertained of it, and maybe this wasinevitable. There is some novelty, but little that is new: in a life so oddly lacking in intimacy of record, the only new things Howard can offer are speculations about Chaucer's personal experience, and most read­ ers will find these either superfluous or embarrassing. DEREK PEARSALL Harvard University ADOLF KATZENELLENBOGEN. Allegories ofthe Virtues and Vices in Medi­ eval Art: From Early Christian Times to the Thirteenth Century. Toronto; Buffalo, N.Y.; and London: University of Toronto Press, 1989. Pp. viii, 102. 48 plates. $10.95 paper. First published in 1939 by the Warburg Institute, this book was reprinted by W W Norton in 1964 and has long been a classic of art history. It has now returned to print, having been given the stamp of enduring value throughits inclusion in theseriesMedievalAcademyReprints for Teaching. Asa reprint the book has the status of an artifact, forit is a photocopy of the earlier edition. Although this makes the book affordable for students-the purpose of the MART series-it also freezes the text in time, creating at the remove of fifty years a work whose value is thus partly historiographic. The equally classic works of Emile Male (Religious Art in France: The Twelfth Century; The Thirteenth Century; The Late Middle Ages) were, by con­ trast, updated both in notes and illustrations in the lavish-and conse203 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER quently not affordable for students-editions issued m the Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press, 1978-86. In this highly organized and elegantly written essay, Katzenellenbogen selected for study a particular type of personification, that of moral con­ cepts, in human, usually female, form. The subtitle of his book is impor­ tant in assessing its usefulness for scholars in medieval literature. Treating the period "From Early Christian Times to the Thirteenth Century," the study culminates in a chapter devoted to the representations ofthe Virtues and Vices on the jambs ofthe central porch ofNotre Dame, Paris, dated to the beginning of the thirteenth century, and in an appendix describes the "break up" of "the finely constructed unity" (p. 82) achieved at Paris in slightly later imitations at Amiens and Chartres. Divided into two parts of three chapters each, the book first treats "Dynamic Representations of the Conflict Between Virtues and Vices," that is, battle scenes serving as illustrations to or influenced by Prudentius's Psychomachia, scenes of the Virtues triumphant over vanquished Vices, and representations of the Ladder ofVirtue. Part 2, "StaticRepresentations ofSystems ofVirtues and Vices," examinestypes ofmoral concepts shown in variousschema, many of them intellectualized and diagrammatic, such as the paired Trees of Vir­ tues and Vices. Like most other writers whose works achieve the status ofclassics, Katzen­ ellenbogen's interests reveal those of the period in which he wrote. He focuses on the formal properties of works of art, prefers the monumental arts to manuscripts, sees High Gothic as the pinnacle of medieval artistic achievement, and declines to examine the fourteenth and fifteenth cen­ turies at all. It is no surprise, nor is it a critique of Katzenellenbogen to observe that this book also treats as unproblematic issues that have subse­ quently moved to the center of current scholarship, such as questions of patronage, reception, and gender. Several generations of...