Anachronic Renaissance

"This is another very very difficult book, not because it’s jargony, but because the ideas are very deep and very sophisticated. It’s about time, and it’s about time in the sense that it looks at how a work of art relates to the images and iconography that come before it, and also that it has an afterlife and that all of that needs to be taken into account when we talk about the work of art. For instance, one of the images that Nagel and Wood evaluates is an image of St. Jerome in his study. So you have the image of St. Jerome, who’s a Christian saint of a particular late antique time period and in his study there are artefacts related to pagan religion and to nascent Christianity. Within the image there are other images that talk about the historical genealogy of the image that we’re looking at. And those images have a relationship to still other images. Every image, according to Nagel and Wood, is a compendium. They also talk about things like non-actual histories of architecture . So, if I’m going to imagine the Temple in Jerusalem , I’m going to imagine it as a Herodian, late-Roman kind of building, in obviously Romanesque style, which it was, and for which we have both archaeological and textual evidence. I can do that, but wouldn’t it be better, since I live in France in the fourteenth century, to imagine it as a Gothic cathedral? These questions of representation and what we do with architecture and history led me in my own work to look more carefully at architectural detail. I notice that in one of the books that I’ve worked on—a haggadah, a liturgy for the home service of Passover Eve, from Franco-Germany in the 1300s—Egypt is represented not with Anubis and Osiris, but with romanesque architecture: rounded arches. This makes sense because in that book Egypt represents a stratum of the Jewish past. We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt. In 1300, of course, the up-and-coming style is the new Gothic. The most elaborately new, extravagant Gothic buildings shown in the manuscript is an image of the temple in Jerusalem. It says “Next year in Jerusalem.” The words “Next year in Jerusalem,” repeated every year on passover, are an incorrect translation. In fact, the Hebrew text says “Within the coming year may we be in Jerusalem.” If you say “Next year in Jerusalem” it is a consummation devoutly to be wished; it is something that is always eternally deferred. But if you say “Within the coming year,” it means Now! So this Gothic depiction of the Temple means, “This is the building we want to see built now!” So I learned from Nagel and Wood that architecture teaches us something particular when it’s anachronic. Very deliberate, and it’s a mitigation of staticness. What we think of as medieval is what Gilbert and Sullivan in Patience called, “Anglo-Saxon attitudes,” people frozen in stained glass in three quarter views, with their hands in ridiculous positions. This has nothing to do with the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages was an extremely fluid, dynamic period that in all its impulses, even though it talked a lot about tradition, mitigated against stasis. In this Jews and Christians participated equally."