Marc Michael Epstein's Reading List

"Leo Steinberg —I emphasise that name—he was a fascinating guy. He was a tough character, a kind of fussy old codger at the time I knew him. I used to have students of mine call him and ask him questions about the book and he would yell at them for interrupting his nap, but then he would go on and give brilliant answers. I emphasise Steinberg because what’s interesting about the book is not necessarily what’s immediately obvious. The book is about—my students call it “the Jesus penis book”—about the fact that Jesus’s genitalia, either juvenile or adult, are emphasised and focussed upon—literally as the conversion point of the orthogonals—in many works of renaissance art, and that this had a particular function and meaning. It was about humanation, it was about the maleness of Christ, and it had particular parallels in sermonic literature, homiletic literature. All that has been lost in modernity—nobody noticed it—and Steinberg noticed it and began to discuss it and of course he got all kinds of flak and he responded to the flak by writing a second part of the book, which is a response to all his critics. I’m interested in the book for a very specific reason. It has less to do with the content, than the fact that this guy noticed. In the course of my thinking about what I would do myself as a medieval art historian if the art was so pervasively Christian I began to think about the fact that, almost without exception, all the famous, important, innovative art historians of medieval Christian art in the twentieth-century in the post-war period were emigré Jews. Whether it was Warburg, or Gombrich, or Krautheimer, you can’t name a name that’s not a German Jewish name. Someone once said that art history in the post-war period consisted of Jewish professors teaching Catholic art to Protestant students. I began to think why this should be, and particularly why such innovative observations—from people like Meyer Shapiro—were made, and I remembered going to art museums with my father—who was this Yeshiva boy manqué—looking at these paintings. There’d be a huge crucifixion scene with about a million people in it, a Northern Renaissance crucifixion scene, and I’d be interested in Jesus—I was six or seven years old—”What did he do? Why is he up there?” My father once in a while would say to me, “That’s what happens to bad little Jewish boys,” but by-and-large he would say something like, “Look over here, down here, far to the left. Do you see that fat man in the red hat? He looks just like his horse, doesn’t he?” My father taught me to avoid the main subject, which was so Christian, and to look at the peripheral and the apparently random or indeterminate, or unimportant. And I realised this: all these German émigré art historians—and you could name 15 or 20—came from households in which there were observant Jewish parents, or maximially, grandparents. They themselves were cosmopolitan citizens of the world, they’d left that all behind, and yet they couldn’t bring themselves to look at medieval Christian art from a devotional perspective, so they had to find alternative perspective. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Steinberg for me is representative of the idea that you look at something that people who are in the business—say, of Christianity—have not looked at, and you, because you are on the edge, see it in a different way. That’s why the fact that Steinberg was a Jew was so important. Because, let me tell you, very few people with Christian backgrounds or even secularised, nominally Christian backgrounds are going to be doing very much thinking about Jesus’s penis. Steinberg, as what we used to call a “confirmed batchelor” and a Jewish man, was able to see things other people weren’t. If we did that we would be mistaken. There are two equally infelicitous alternatives: people who say, “I can’t say anything about an image unless I have a text to pin it on,” and people who say, “Images exists completely independently in the artist’s mind from texts.” It’s not that images are wedded to texts, but images are wedded to culture, and culture is influenced by texts, and by sermons, and by conversations that people have in the street. It would be a mistake to think about looking at art completely divorced from its cultural contexts. But it would also be a mistake to say, “Here we have a picture of x, y, z and here I found the text that explains it exactly, thank you very much.” First of all it’s really boring, but secondly it’s very reductionist. Steinberg helps us to move toward looking at the image. But when you look at the image, you realise people were saying things in sermons like, “Jesus’s maleness is important, Jesus’s humanity , his maleness is part of his humanity, etc., etc.”"

"Michael Camille was a fascinating art historian who died too young. He did, in a sense, what Leo Steinberg did. He said, “Let’s look at a bunch of stuff that nobody really noticed before, or they found playful, or just weird.” He argued that one could read the margins of manuscripts as responding to what was going on in the text; sometimes in very literal and literary ways and sometimes in more abstract ways. He opened people’s eyes to the fact that you could have a very solemn text that was created by and for monastic patrons and the margins of the page could depict monkeys fucking each other, or cranes sodomising lions. Rather than think of these things as light relief, he argues that they had significance. He does it brilliantly, and he adduces texts and sociology and talks about the different contexts of margins and marginality. This is helpful for me because when I look at manuscripts made for Jews, I’m at an advantage because in the Jewish tradition the marginal area of manuscripts and printed book serve particularly as the commentary area. In a way this is a thesis ready-made for the study of medieval visual culture created for Jews. I just love this idea of the literally edgy. My next book is called Extremities: Mapping the Margins of Jewish Visual Culture and it’s about literal margins as well as conceptual ones. So Camille was a tremendous influence and I’m sorry that he’s left this world. Yes, you could. It indicates a self-awareness on the part of the protagonists of religious acts—monks—that there is always this side of life that is tempting, that is weird, that is outré, that they either have to resist, or admit that they came from a situation where they were fallen and they indulged in it. But this sense of self-reckoning, where you realise that the world is a world in which one hopes that the centre will hold, but in which the periphery—in which there’s always unbelief and there are always poor people, and challenging disabilities, and other kinds of threats to the idea of God’s perfectly ordered universe—is waiting to encroach and the question is: are they part of your world, or are they something that is utterly abhorrent and must be kept out? The answer is that if they were utterly abhorrent and had to be kept out, they wouldn’t be in the cathedrals or the books at all. But they’re there, which means that they are part of that world and they need to be reckoned with. It’s an answer to the black-and-white, good-and-bad of religious morality and moralising and theology."

"This is a hard book, it can’t be read—or summarised—in the sort of light way the other two can. Sure. when we think about Protestants and their art, we think of—at least in America—whitewashed Congregationalist churches on the green in New Haven, or Boston. In fact, argues Joseph Leo Koerner—another Jew—there was a Protestant art, and it was particularly didactic. It involved, for instance, images of Luther facing an audience, with Luther on the right, the audience listening to the sermon, divided by sex, on the left, everybody’s dressed very Protestant and the image is very spare—it’s just a stone room—and yet, in the middle of the image, is an image of the crucified Christ, and there are rays coming from Luther’s mouth. You realise that Luther’s sermon is making real, making manifest, the crucified Christ just as transubstantiation made the real presence of Christ made known to a Catholic congregation. Paul’s assertion that “We preach Christ crucified,” is here literally manifest, and so the image becomes very important in Protestantism. The most fascinating thing for me is to see the same artists—the Cranach family—Lucas Cranach the elder and the younger, in transition between being Catholic artists and being Protestant artists. You’ll see a crucifixion from BL—Before Luther—and it’s a crucifixion that takes place in historical space: it has the three Marys, it has the bad Jews and Romans, it has the Centurion, and it has the thieves, and then you’ll see a crucifixion by the same artist that happens after Luther, and all you’ll have there is the Centurion. He’ll be saying—in German—“Truly this one is the son of God.” It encapsulates what Protestantism is, which is the idea of sola fide , ‘only faith,’ and of individual faith at that. “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.” People tend to think that history works in neatly periodised soundbites. That one goes to sleep on the evening of December 31st 1299 someplace in Italy in the Middle Ages and wakes up January 1st 1300 and says, “Feels like the Renaissance this morning.” It didn’t happen that way, everything was happening simultaneously. Everything was a process and, to me Koerner’s book both liberates us from the idea Protestants had no art and explains what Protestant art was. It explains that really there were no Protestants. Just like when Jesus was hanging around with a bunch of guys in Galilee, there were no Christians, there were Jesus-people. What were they? Were they Jews? Yeah, were they Christians? Not yet, not quite. Same thing with the Reformation. You heard Luther’s message, but could you dump all your Catholicism? No, so it was a gradual process. This book really exemplifies for me—that word again—the interstitiality, the in-betweenness, the liminality of one’s theological position."

"So this is an early Christian manuscript, one of the earlier Christian illuminated manuscripts, and it contains scenes from the Hebrew Bible: the old Testament. And Dorothy Verkerk is also someone who thinks differently. It had been previously thought that when one read a sequence of iconographical narrative interventions, one read them because they were linked with a text that—say the Hebrew Bible—in the order in which they appear in the text. Verkerk’s brilliant analysis, which does many many other things, says that one can read across the page chiasmically, like an ‘X’. Or one can skip and go back. In other words, it seems that the reading of images is not necessarily linear, sequential and chronological. The reason she concludes this—and here again the written text intervenes—is the fact that sermons for catechumens, that is people converting to Christianity, very often jumped in ways that the iconography of this manuscript jumped: in order to make particular Christian didactic points and connections. Here’s a technique being employed in visual culture that’s also being employed in the sermons and the conversionary material of Christian literary and homiletic culture. She’s not arguing that these texts illustrate sermons and homilies, rather she is saying that these texts require the same method in reading or understanding that homilies and sermons require. That’s what I got out of that book, the idea that one could read across the page. One of the things that’s interesting to think about with it is the uses to which the Hebrew Bible is put. That is, in a Jewish context an illustration of the Tabernacle in the wilderness may mean one thing. In a Christian context it comes to mean another thing. It’s the same basis but it gains a sort of polyvalency. What that says about the relationship between the two cultures is difficult to say, because we don’t have that much information about the backdrop of this particular manuscript."

"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."