Foundation of the Empress type

[baba-prague]

I saw this today, and thought it might be relevant, as well as interesting for you:

http://www.library.unsw.edu.au/~the...oved/adt-NUN20060418.132822/public/02main.pdf

Our idea of 'basic' references differs, though. My basic references are ones made about the same time as the imagery I'm investigating. But each to his own.

No, not my idea of basic references. What I said - clearly I think - was that even the most basic, simple to read undergraduate stuff makes this point. 101. So why would you assume people here do not understand it?

I think I'll just have to leave you to it now as I prefer discussion that's a bit differently managed than this. Have fun - this is a nice forum and people try to assume that others have a decent level of both intelligence and knowledge. It all helps the discussion to flow better.

Oh, by the way, the link times out on my broadband connection. I'll try again when I have time.

 

[DianeOD]

More general

I was thinking of your interest in public and sculpted imagery. Perhaps the long footnote on this page is more to the point:

http://www.library.unsw.edu.au/~the...oved/adt-NUN20060418.132822/public/02main.pdf


About my note above, I was speaking more generally about the difficulty of reading medieval imagery as it was designed to be read. After all I live in modern western culture too. Its hard work - quie a bit more than a semester's work in my case - to develop the 'right' mental framework to read imagery as people in that 'other country' are said to have done.

As for this forum: I have learned a great deal here in the three weeks or so that I've visited, appreciate it very much, and think that the atmosphere here is most unusual - in that the majority of people at Aeclectic are happy to hear widely different points of view.

 

[Moonbow]

Moderator Note

Healthy debate is encouraged here at Aeclectic and particularly in these History forums where it is necessary and also expected. Whilst I understand and support the need for facts to be produced when ideas are stated as fact, please be considerate to the viewer and how your wording comes across when questioning this. The last thing Aeclectic wants to do it discourage ideas.

Thanks
Moonbow*

 

[baba-prague]

Thanks Moonbow. But I reserve the right to correct - in clear and polite terms - an implication that I am a blithering idiot who would try to interpret a piece of medieval art as though it's by Picasso (one would indeed have to be idiotic - and I don't think most people on this forum are). I found that laughable, but I would rather see it corrected for the record. Though I realise I probably should have simply walked away giggling.

I don't intend to post here any more as it is proving a complete waste of time on several levels. But I appreciate your work in moderating here - thanks again.

Edited to add. Neither link downloads for me. They either time out or I get a message to say that they are encrypted. I give up! I don't know if anyone else can get them to work?

 

[jmd]

Glad to see, Diane, that you have realised that you

"have found that one of the stumbling blocks to explaining monastic art, and much of the imagery produced in Europe prior to, say 1490 or so, is that in our modern world, art is

(a) assumed an expression of the individual's artistic perceptions

(b) primarily concerned with the thing represented - that is to say we tend to ask questions like "what does the Empress represent for the artist, and what is he trying to 'tell' us about the Empress-sort of person.'"​

It is quite an astounding new insight when you assume otherwise. As baba-prague mentions, this is taken as a given by those who have worked with such materials for some time, but is worthwhile pointing out as a reminder, and applying to one's own work.

In a similar light, you will find previous comments by baba-prague (and others) may help in overcoming other stumbling blocks to scholarly research. In the same way that an artist worked very much within the creative context of very specific references, these were within due bounds that you seem to regularly break in seeking to apply to the mediaeval mindset a far more modern one that wants to bring in distant and disconnected similarities.

Some of the specific similarities in imagery are of course highly interesting. Accurate references (when supplied) would of course also assist (but acknowledge that I too rarely supply these, though never claim someone else's work as my own).

 

[DianeOD]

Distant and disconnected similarities

Distant, yes. Disconnected, no.

I am not new to scholarly research, but the area I am discussing is understandably one not so well known: that is, the transmission of eastern techniques, religious custom and imagery - verbal and iconographic - into the west, between the 9th and (say) fourteenth centuries.

The line of connection between east and west is not disconnected, so much as intermittent, and while Coptic Egypt or Nestorian Persia is physically distant from western Europe, it is not distant in the other sense. The intercourse between the eastern Christian communities and the west is known, and as well documented as can reasonably be expected, given - among other things - the systematic destruction of the Nestorian enclaves of Persia and inner Asia from the 13-14thC onwards, not to mention the earlier waves of destruction, which had also obliterated Harran and Palmyra.

What is new, I think, and being resisted to an extent, is that the contact between east and west directly influenced the imagery - verbal and iconographic - of western Christendom.

When I first began speaking about this matter, in 1998, the reaction to any mention of the western religious tradition *at all* met with the sort of reaction now being made in regard to other aspects of the question.

At present, my experience is that any discussion of the antecedents of this imagery, even within earlier Europe, is uncomfortable for many. Tracing it back along the intermittent, but consistent line of contact with the eastern traditions, or identifying them as based on figures from folk-astronomy used a 'types' in eastern literature and imagery, seems to impel some from the oridinary responses of doubt, or interest, into open antagonism.

I don't really understand why; I'm not arguing that the tarot pack as we know it was not given its now-conventional form in Europe, only that its antecedents are from elsewhere, and that they can be - and were - traced.

If other people's chief interest is in other aspects of the pack, and in the later forms for the imagery, that's fine.

I realise it is upsetting for some to have it suggested that it was not Muslim soldiers - or something - who brought the idea of a pack to Europe, or that its initial uses include ones other than calculation games.

So long as the information I can provide is of interest to members, there is some point in my discussing it. If its simply causing contention and upset, I see no real reason to persist, and feel no ill-will about desisting.

 

[Debra]

The reason people are "upset" has been stated by them (including me) quite clearly and has nothing to do with the substance of your argument, DianeOD, insofar as that substance occasionally and perhaps totally by accident becomes visible.

To imply that an amorphous hypothesis (knowable only to those who read your unavailable 1000-page essay) has been rejected because of our narrow-mindedness, ignorance or other intellectual or emotional weakness--that's nonsense.