On the Uses of Iconographic Study: The Example of the Sponsus from St. Martial of Limoges

On the Uses of Iconographic Study: The Example of the Sponsus From St. Martial of Limoges Clifford Davidson The great advantage of the study of iconography in relation to early drama is that it ruptures the usual self-contained struc­ tures that literary criticism has consistently attempted to impose on individual plays and on quasi-dramatic forms. Careful and systematic study of the iconography quickly determines that the dramatic structures being observed are not at all self-contained, and that instead they involve a careful focusing of our attention that paradoxically denies the unity of the dramatic action. Indeed, the concept of unity, which is still being applied to such plays by some American critics, is surely the most inaccurate conception that could possibly be utilized as a device to describe the “action” of early drama, which was never intended to be viewed as a self-sufficient art form. The religious plays in par­ ticular have their roots in cultic experience, and are deeply influenced by the manner in which the cult looks at religious scenes in the visual arts as well as in imagination. When we turn specifically to the medieval religious music drama as well as to the quasi-dramatic rituals to which it was so closely related, the purpose of the spectacle is quite easily distinguished; in the words of Dom Odo Casel appropriately quoted by C. Clifford Flanigan in a study of the Quem queritis trope, “God has made it possible for us, even in this life, to enter into the divine pre­ sent.”! Iconography therefore leads quite naturally to phenom­ enology and the recognition that perceived experience and observable structures need to be the focus of our attention as we attempt to place the individual medieval play, in this case the Sponsus from St. Martial of Limoges, into its proper critical context. 300 Clifford Davidson 301 Iconographie study itself, of course, needs to be disciplined and careful if it is to provide the kind of convincing information that will illuminate plays and create the groundwork for similarly meticulous work on the phenomenology of dramatic forms. This is particularly important at this time because of the methodo­ logical crisis that the study of drama as literature is now exper­ iencing. Some recent studies of texts have unfortunately tended to violate their integrity, to cut them off from attention to their original purpose, and to exploit them for political and other purposes.2 Therefore our work of scholarship and criticism needs to take the greatest care with regard to its approach to the many diverse aspects of even an individual scene, and indeed these aspects include much that can never be known through texts at all. Thus contemporary illustrations in the visual arts will be seen to contain crucial information that is very difficult to reduce to verbal equivalents. There are very specific ways in which the designs, for example, of manuscript illuminations from St. Martial of Limoges which are contemporary with the Sponsus would throw light on the way the scenes of the play were visualized.3 At the same time, of course, texts must not be neglected, for they are capable of providing the necessary linkage of ideas that will piece together for us the meaning of a particular frag­ ment of spectacle. Our methodology will avoid merely the tracing of iconographie ideas apart from their hermeneutic context, for it is true that iconographie configurations may have different meanings in different periods and different settings. We also need carefully to avoid neat schema of causes and effects, of assumptions ultimately based on rather simplistic notions about literary and dramatic sources. Hence it would seem appropriate to examine first the work of an influential critic, Émile Mâle, who has previously considered the Sponsus not in terms of its structure as play or in terms of its purpose, but in terms of finding missing links between examples in the arts and their presumed sources.4 Indeed, Mâle’s attempts to trace the widespread iconography of the Wise and Foolish Virgins in an entire region in France to the play at St. Martial would seem to place the Sponsus somewhat in the untenable position of the...