Board of Trustees of Western Michigan University through its Medieval Institute

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VISUALITY
Author(s): Alexa Sand
Source: Studies in Iconography, Vol. 33, Special Issue Medieval Art History Today—Critical
Terms (2012), pp. 89-95
Published by: Board of Trustees of Western Michigan University through its Medieval
Institute Publications and Trustees of Princeton University
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23924275
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 VISUALITY

Alexa Sand

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun "visuality" four ways. Th
first two definitions reflect the usage of Thomas Carlyle, Scottish transcendent
essayist and social commentator, who coined the term in the 1830s: "The stat
quality of being visual or visible to the mind; mental visibility," and "a mental
ture or vision" (OED, s.v. "visuality" 1, 2). The third and fourth date to around
turn of the twentieth century: "Vision, sight," and "Visual aspect or representat
physical appearance" (3, 4). The trajectory from Carlyle's concept of visuality
an internalized visual phenomenon to the more general, materialist character of
later definitions suggests that the word has undergone a degradation of semi
complexity over the nearly two centuries it has been in use. However, overlook
by the OED, a newly complex and technical use of visuality has come into pla
Since at least 1988 it has been resuscitated as a term of art among critics and
torians of the visual—what might otherwise be named art history in the expan
field.1 As many observers have noted, the adoption of the term "visuality" c
responded to a wider phenomenon that took place in art history, literary stud
and philosophy in the last quarter of the twentieth century; the so-called visua
pictorial turn.2 In brief, visuality has come to mean "the visual perspective fro
which certain culturally constituted aspects of artifacts and pictures are visibl
informed viewers,"3 or, put more bluntly, the element of visual experience tha
contingent on culture and therefore far more unstable and resistant to descript
than even the most complex of biological functions. As such, the term is a tool
getting at that most compelling and difficult of art historical questions: how d
people in past or alien cultures perceive the objects we now study, what expe
ences and ideas grounded their viewing, and what, in the end, did they see?
Returning to the varying definitions of visuality, Nicholas Mirzoeff ha
shown that Thomas Carlyle's nineteenth-century coinage served his reactiona
agenda, in which a heroic, individualistic, imperial subject controlled both hist
and the future through his spiritually elevated vision.4 Mining Carlyle's writin
for his various uses of the term, I have also noticed that whereas the OED's c
tions for definitions 1 and 2 indicate a disembodied and purely mental order
vision, Carlyle himself used visuality more loosely, yoking spiritual insight a

© 2012 by the Board of Trustees of Western Michigan University

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90 Alexa Sand

memory to the physical body and its sensorium. This seems t

medieval conception of vision, a point to which I will return. Fir
to attend to the more recent implications of visuality for art histo
lar for medieval art history.
Visuality, according to Hal Foster, marks the site of "a diff
visual—between the mechanism of sight and its historical techn
datum of vision and its discursive determinations."5 Informed
courses of alterity, as well as by new discoveries in neuropsych
science, the new usage of visuality in the 1990s allowed art hist
the history of their own discipline, revisiting such figures as A
Panofsky, Alois Riegl, and Rudolph Arnheim, and plumbing the
into what the visual object has to say about historical "ways of
John Berger's useful phrase). Although certain critics and art h
long while, been thinking about visuality in terms of the dark mat
visual experience, hermeneutics, and history, what was differ
visuality was its insistence on a kind of uncertainty principle
by Robert Nelson's concluding words in his introduction to Vi
Beyond the Renaissance: "Our book ends without closure and w
desire on the part of its authors. . . . The more we have learned
discovered our ignorance. The process has seemed a bit like that
one, of the blind 'man' and the elephant. We, of course, might
that we can see and know what an elephant looks like. But
plaintive question resonates with Michael Ann Holly's call to art
"fresh incisions" into the field and to "suffer the sting of loss" tha
recognition that our objects are irrevocably of the past, mark
resistant to stable interpretations.7
Medievalist art historians are no strangers to the sense of lo
been compelled by the partial and fragmentary nature of the o
to acknowledge the chimerical nature of our interpretive goals.
of "what we talk about when we talk about medieval art" (apol
Carver) has never been easy; competing accounts of the status
as "art" or "not art" dog the field from the moment of its entr
discourse in the mid-nineteenth century, in the writings of su
Viollet-le-Duc and Ruskin, or slightly later, Wilhelm Vöge. Th
persisted is evident in Meyer Schapiro's 1947 essay, "On the Aes
Romanesque Art," where his agenda was to challenge the idea t
was strictly religious and symbolical, submitted to collective aim
from the aestheticism and individualism of our age."8 Whether
vinced by Schapiro's argument, the point is that already by the
of medieval art were almost per force investigating medieval

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 Visuality 91

to understand what and how it was medieval people saw when they encountered a
variety of visual objects we now classify as works of art.
The anachronistic nature of the term "art" is part of what has consistently
driven medievalists to query the objects of their study in terms of contemporary
texts pertaining to perception and interpretation of perceptual data. Sometimes
this is explicit, as in Hans Belting's monumental study devoted to "a history of
the image before the era of art"9; but more often, as in Panofsky's work on Abbot
Suger, or, on the other hand, Alain Erlande-Brandenburg's analysis of the "social
dynamics" of Gothic cathedral building, the argument is rooted in an awareness
of the anachronism of "art" as category.10 That said, medievalists came relatively
late to the terms "visuality" and "visual culture." "Visuality" appears in print in the
pages of Gesta for the first time in 2002.11 Perhaps the next obvious thing would be
to catalogue the scholars who turned the methods of inquiry and critical concerns
of the emergent field of visual studies towards the medieval in the mid 1990s; but
any such list would inevitably do injustice to those omitted while doing very little
to illuminate the question of visuality as it pertains to medieval art history. Instead,
I want to attempt to characterize the mode of inquiry inculcated by the emergence
of visuality as a heuristic device for understanding medieval visual objects.
Visuality asks us to look differently at familiar objects but also to turn our
gaze on objects resistant to the traditional methods of our discipline. The Middle
Ages offer a wealth of such objects, among them the drawings, sketches, diagrams,
and scribal doodles found in abundance in manuscripts. A graduate seminar on the
so-called "album" of Villard de Honnecourt introduced me to the tenacity with
which medieval drawings could resist classification and interpretation while at the
same time tantalizing the scholarly eye with their promise of authenticity. More
recently, I've become fascinated by the work of the eccentric fourteenth-century
Italian cleric Opicinus de Canistris, whose autograph manuscripts—part autobiog
raphy, part screed—are accompanied by carefully finished drawings, or rather, one
might say they in part consist of these drawings.12 As Karl Whittington's contribu
tion to this volume ("Queer") demonstrates, it is the very queerness of Opicinus de
Canistris's representational strategies that make them revelatory of the boundaries
and normative categories against and across which they work. From the standpoint
of visuality too, Opicinus's drawings offer fertile interpretive ground. They col
lapse the human body, the life history of an individual, political ideology, theo
logical cosmology, and the terrain of the entire known world together onto the flat
surface of the page, straining to make materially visible the totality of God's work.
Although, as Whittington puts it, "unambiguously queer," these drawings express
an urgency to bridge the gap between what is physiological about vision—what
is material, present, and representable—and what is visible beyond the limits of
physiology that is entirely symptomatic of the drawings' period. The first half of

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92 Alexa Sand

the fourteenth century witnessed a particularly feverish eng

tions about the relationship between ocular perception and visi
for example, in the polarizing controversy over the beatific v
and 1330s.13 In their peculiar way, Opicinus's drawings share
giving form to the invisible with many contemporary works, su
diagrams of the Speculum Theologiae found in the Psalter of
a number of other manuscripts.14
Opicinus explicitly framed his illuminations as representat
revelatory visions that effected in him a spiritual conversion w
even in, his body. The bodily character of medieval visionary
to one of the ways in which the current use of the term "visual
troublesome. Encoded in its primary emphasis on the visual sen
mined mind-body division of the post-Enlightenment episteme
of and technological accounting for vision that assigns it to th
Cartesian subjectivity. But for Opicinus and his contemporarie
an instrument of the mind useful for mapping the cosmos tha
of the body, both mortal and spiritual, for being in the cosm
described medieval vision in opposition to modern vision as par
even physically, of objects, resulting in an "intertwining of vi
If medieval vision is understood as fundamentally rooted i
wherein the body, as Caroline Walker Bynum has argued, is "t
expression ... of what we today call individuality," then as a t
visuality must always return to embodiment and materiality, b
and spiritual dimensions.16
Recently I have been studying some ivory mirror cases pro
the early decades of the fourteenth century. These are secular ob
side they depict subjects drawn from contemporary Romance
in that their ostensible purpose—to reflect their user's face and
social status—is not only peripheral to the ideal spiritual life
anity but at odds with it. Yet, and I am not the first to notice t
literature frequently interwove narratives of sexual desire with
tual love, so the iconography of courtship on these cases encomp
and carnal themes.17 What's more, the function of the object, its r
is quite literally framed in terms of both spiritual and bodily d
For a late medieval viewer, to see oneself reflected in a handheld
simply about checking to see if one had something stuck in one
What drew me to these mirror cases was the frustration of enc
in museum settings; palm-sized, smoothly-carved, fashioned o
sensual materials employed by medieval sculptors, they beckon
manuscripts specialist, I'm used to handling the objects of my s

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 Visuality 93

think about what happens with them, visually and physically, as I turn their pages,
pick them up, open or close them; their visual properties are inextricable from their
materiality. The inaccessibility of the ivory mirror cases in their vitrines, along with
the fact that their identity as mirrors is obscured both by the universal loss of their
reflective surfaces and by the way they are displayed, led me to wonder about such
objects as components in a bodily and performative visuality.18 In this expanded
sense, where the visual flows into and across other sensory perceptions and mental
processes, visuality is a useful concept for inquiry into these objects. On the other
hand, without the methods of a more conservative and technical mode of research,
in this case archeology, I would not have been in any position to think about the
reflective surfaces of the objects in terms of visuality.19 The fragmentary nature of
so many medieval objects, and their long histories of use, reuse, and abuse, sets an
imperative that we continually return to "old" methods such as codicology or stra
tigraphy to gather the data that make any discussion of visualities possible.
Mirror cases without their mirrors—objects both insistently present and para
doxically lost—seem to me apt figures for the problem and the promise of the new
visuality for engaging with medieval art. While I cannot agree with her characteriza
tion of art history's more traditional procedures as "fossilized," I do find convincing
Michael Ann Holly's proposition that the art historical enterprise is fundamentally a
melancholic quest to recover the irrecoverable, and that only in acknowledging the
"compelling visuality" of the art historical object on its own terms do we make any
meaningful movement toward understanding.20 These terms, however, include all
dimensions of the object's materiality, form, and fragmentation.
It is this physicality wed to immateriality, this spiritual and bodily duality
that tie the recent use of visuality in medieval art history back to its origins in
Thomas Carlyle's writings, and that make Carlyle himself sound medieval. What
the OED's lexicographers miss is that for Carlyle, visuality was paradoxically both
an interiorized spiritual perception and an insistently bodily, material, and physical
true image of the world. An eyewitness description of a dead and distant historical
figure becomes, in Carlyle's words, "a remarkable visuality: through a pair of clear
human eyes, you look face to face on the very figure of the man,"21 as if the physi
cal organs of sight are somehow plucked out of their original owner's sockets and
implanted in those of the reader. Just as Opicinus imagined and made visible a spir
itual reality beyond the grasp of the physical senses, though inherent in the human
body itself, Carlyle conceived of visuality as a spiritual state extended through
the individual body and its perceptions across the face of the earth; Carlyle's Vic
torian reader in his armchair in London sees across vast gulfs of space and time.
The phrase "face to face" echoes the Pauline formulation of the soul's vision of
God at the end of time, a trope necessary to understanding the semiotics of reflec
tion, of mirrors, and of self-scrutiny in the Middle Ages. In a sense then the whole

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94 Alexa Sand

project of visuality is medieval, in that it prods at the places

ence comes loose from rational explanation, and vision serves
the unspeakable, invisible, and sublime realm of the sacred, an
ible, and tangible essence of bodily life.

NOTES

1. The first well-documented use of the term "visuality" occurs in the context of the 1988
posium sponsored by the Dia Art Foundation and the subsequent publication of the proceeding
Foster, ed., Vision and Visuality, Discussions in Contemporary Culture 2 (Seattle: Bay Press
James Elkins traces the associated term "visual culture" to Michael Baxandall's Painting and
ence in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); see James Elkins, Visual Stud
Skeptical Introduction (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 2.
2. For "the visual turn," see Martin Jay, "Cultural Relativism and the Visual Turn," Journ
Visual Culture 1 (2002): 267-78. For "the pictorial tum," see W. J. T. Mitchell, "The Pictorial T
in Picture Theory: Essays in Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Ch
Press, 1994), 11.
3. The quote is from a blurb, available on the press's website, about Whitney Davis's A Ge
Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), accessed pre-publ
on January 3, 2011, http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9315.html.
4. Nicholas Mirzoeff, "On Visuality," Journal of Visual Culture 5 (2006): 53-79. Mirzoef
traces the appropriation of the term by nineteenth-century social reformers and characterizes
tory as a "complex and challenging genealogy."
5. Foster, preface to Vision and Visuality, ix.
6. Robert Nelson, "Descarte's Cow and Other Domestications of the Visual," in Visuality be
and beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert Nelson (Cambridge: Cam
University Press, 2000), 14.
7. Michael Ann Holly, "Mourning and Method," in Compelling Visuality: The Work of A
and out of History, ed. Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg (Minneapolis and London: Uni
of Minnesota Press, 2003), 156-78, at 175.
8. Meyer Schapiro, "On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art," in Art and Thought:
in Honor of Dr. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday, ed. K. Bh
Iyer (London: Luzac and Co., 1947), 130-50; reprinted in Romanesque Art: Selected Papers
York: George Braziller, 1977), 1.
9. Hans Belting, Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Mun
C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1990).
10. Erwin Panofsky, Gerda Panofsky-Soergel, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.
and Its Art Treasures (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); Alain Erlande-Brande
The Cathedral: The Social and Architectural Dynamics of Construction (Cambridge: Camb
University Press, 1994).
11. Karen Rose Matthews, "Reading Romanesque Sculpture: The Iconography and Rece
of the South Portal Sculpture at Santiago de Compostela," Gesta 39 (2002): 3-12.
12. The manuscripts, which date to the late 1330s, are Vatican City, Vatican Library,
Palatinus Latinus 1993, and Vatican City, Vatican Library, Codex Vaticanus 6435. My introd
to Opicinus came in the context of a 1992-93 Townsend Center for the Humanities Working G
One of the participants, Victoria Morse, was working on Opicinus's place in the intellectual hi
of the early fourteenth century. The group's focus was on medieval history and the visual doc
See Victoria Morse, "A Complex Terrain: Church, Society, and the Individual in the Works
cino de Canistris (1296-ca. 1354)," PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996.

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 Visuality 95

13. For a brief account, see Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western
Christianity, 200-1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 279-91.
14. See Lucy Freeman Sandler, The Psalter of Robert de Lisle in the British Library (London:
Harvey Miller, 1998), 107ff.
15. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Fis ion in Twentieth-Century French Thought
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 30.
16. Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 11.
17. Alcuin Blamires, "The 'Religion of Love' in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Medieval
Visual Art," in Word and Visual Imagination: Studies in the Interaction of English Literature and the
Visual Arts, ed. K. J. Höltgen et al. (Erlangen: Universitätsbiliothek, 1988), 20-21; Michael Camille,
The Medieval Art of Love (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 111-12; Susan Smith, "The Gothic
Mirror and the Female Gaze" in Saints, Sinners, and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval
and Early Modern Europe, ed. Jane Carroll and Alison Stewart (Burlington and Aldershot: Ashgate,
2003), 73-93.
18. "The Fairest of Them All: Reflections on Some Fourteenth-Century Mirrors," in Push Me,
Pull You: Interaction, Imagination and Devotional Practices in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art,
Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, ed. Sarah Blick and Laura Gelfand (Leiden: Brill,
2011) 1:529-60.
19. Contrary to the widely disseminated idea that the ivory mirror cases held polished metal
reflective surfaces, the majority of the mirrors were probably glass, according to archeologist Inge
borg Krueger, of the Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn. She kindly shared her research with me and
sent me offprints of her publications on medieval glass mirrors: "Glasspiegel im Mittelalter: Fakten,
Funde und Fragen," Bonner Jahrbücher 190 (1990), 233-313; and "Glasspiegel im Mittelalter II:
Neue Funde und neue Fragen," Bonner Jahrbücher 195 (1995), 209^18.
20. Holly, "Mourning and Method," 158-59.
21. Thomas Carlyle, "Dr. Francia," in Essays by Thomas Carlyle (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart,
1849), 559.

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