Worringer writes, with obvious overstatement, that the interior of the Gothic cathedral is "all mysticism" and "the exterior construction is all scholasticism". As his argument develops, it becomes clear that his analogy to Scholasticism entails activity on both the inside and the outside of the cathedral. For Worringer it is "a certain involved, contorted movement of thought as such", not the specific content of Aquinas' theology, that links Gothic architecture to Scholasticism:
It was not the result of thought, but the abstract process of the movement of thought, which bred in the Scholastic that intellectual ecstasy which stupefied and liberated him,—in the same way as the abstract process of movement in the line, which he made visible in ornament, or . . . the abstract movement in the energies of stone, which he made visible in architecture.
Worringer takes the least of Ruskin's Gothic moral elements Redundancy or Generosity and gives it top billing. In effect, he locates in the form of Scholastic argument something akin to the concept of grace it articulates: a supplementary and gratuitous energy.
For Worringer, Gothic form synthesizes the dialectic between naturalistic and non-naturalistic styles in Western art history discussed in his 1908 bestseller, Abstraction and Empathy. There he defines artistic abstraction as a withdrawal of subjective feeling from the perceived object, reflecting a straining beyond the physical world, in contrast to empathy, which entails a transfer of feeling from subject to object, resulting in more naturalistic forms. Abstraction and Empathy was championed by the German expressionist artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde, as justifying their angular, energetic style, and was applied by the English critic T. E. Hulme to his prescient discussions of modernist abstraction in art and literature. Even as the Great War raged, damaging cathedrals at Soisson, Rouen, and Reims, Worringer oversaw a fourth edition of Form in Gothic while on leave from the front, where the Northern impulse for redundant movement was finding new expression in trench warfare. Ironically, his sharp distinction between Northern and Classical styles was co-opted by the Nazis, who denounced expressionism as degenerate and propagated representational art and classical architecture as tonics for the German nation.
Erwin Panofsky was art historian and rector at the University of Hamburg (the first Jewish rector of a German university), until the Nazis ousted him in 1933 and he began a distinguished academic career in the United States. In 1948 he delivered the Wimmer Lecture at Saint Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, published in 1951 as Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism and later issued in paperback and numerous translations. Panofsky proposes manifestatio "CLARIFICATION FOR CLARIFICATION'S SAKE" as the formal principle uniting Gothic architecture and Scholastic theology (Gothic 34-35). Cutting through Worringer's vague racial model to a more sophisticated understanding of Scholasticism, and, like Adams, a greater focus on master architects as intellectuals (exposed to Scholastic ideas, he argues), Panofsky sobers Worringer's intoxication of the senses. Indeed, he finds in Gothic architecture the very clarification that for Worringer is the antithesis of the Gothic and the essence of Classicism. Panofsky argues that three core principles of Scholastic argument also apply to Gothic architecture. Firstly, "totality (sufficient enumeration)." Like Scholastic theology, the High Gothic cathedral "sought to embody the whole of Christian knowledge, theological, moral, natural, historical, with everything in its place and that which no longer found its place, suppressed" (Gothic 31, 44-45). Secondly, "arrangement according to a system of homologous parts and parts of parts (sufficient articulation)." Just as the well-ordered Scholastic treatise is arranged in a hierarchy of consistent logical levels, so the Gothic cathedral divides into nave, transept, and chevet, with a hierarchy of subdivisions, resembling one another in their pointed arches and triangular ground plans—a uniformity that sets the Gothic apart from the Romanesque (Gothic 31, 45-49). As Aquinas maintains, "the senses delight in things duly proportioned as in something akin to them; for the sense, too, is a kind of reason as is every cognitive power" (qtd. in Panofsky, Gothic 38). And finally, "distinctness and deductive cogency (sufficient interrelation)." The homologous order mirrored in different parts of the cathedral, as in the treatise, is balanced by the clear articulation between parts: between shafts and walls, between vertical elements and their arches. Simultaneously, the Gothic style requires a mutual inference among parts, so that we can "infer, not only the interior from the exterior or the shape of the side aisles from that of the central nave but also, say, the organization of the whole system from the cross section of one pier" (Gothic 31, 50-51).
For Panofsky, the Gothic cathedral, like the Scholastic summa, is an edifice of "solutions" to organizational problems faced by master intellectuals. Where Worringer sees a superabundance of random movement, inspired by unconscious racial character, Panofsky sees "gratuitous clarification" consciously achieved (Gothic 60). Panofsky's conception of the Gothic implicitly rejects Ruskin's notion of an "unaccusable whole" arising willy-nilly from "the labour of inferior minds." Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism typifies Panofsky's signature theory of iconology, whereby the visual image codifies "those underlying principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion—qualified by one personality and condensed into one work" (Panofsky, Meaning 30). This theory, focusing on the work of educated personalities, underlies Panofsky's study of linear perspective as the central "symbolic form" of the Renaissance, the key to politics, philosophy, and poetry, as it does his influential essay on motion pictures, which he compares, in their massive coordination of artists under a central vision, to medieval cathedrals.
For all their differences, Ruskin, Adams, Worringer, and Panofsky each tell a story of decline. The medieval synthesis came apart. The Renaissance, in Ruskin's view, suppressed individual workers' creativity and, according to the others, unleashed separate strains of mysticism and empiricism that Scholastic theology and Gothic architecture had, for a time, held together. These writers traced analogies between the Gothic and the Scholastic as a refuge, perhaps, from modern societies that offered no coherent belief to anchor artistic experimentation. At the same time, however, formal order—where form and function merge, and ornament, even if seemingly gratuitous, streams into a meaningful whole—is the underlying dream of modernism, as it was, for these writers, the aspiration of Gothic architecture. These studies are highly original works of imagination, mutually illuminating yet isolated from one another (the absence of Ruskin from Adams' book, and of Worringer from Panofsky's, are matters of choice). Although criticized as scholarship, each survives as a work of creativity. Panofsky's study is the most scholarly of the four, but the least emotionally satisfying, and the least nervous: the fretting of remote Gothic artisans, the mysterious ascent of towers, the gratuitous motion of tracery, all fire the imagination more than does gratuitous clarification. However, Ruskin, Adams, Worringer, and Panofsky all discerned in Gothic architecture and Scholasticism a particular synthesis of organic detail and abstract form, resonant with their intellectual, aesthetic, and social visions, and perhaps with their emotional needs. Medieval Gothic is an outcast, earlier modernism in which later modern observers, working amid shifting forms of society and culture, have repeatedly imagined themselves. "It is that strange disquietude of the Gothic spirit that is its greatness," Ruskin writes; "that restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders hither and thither among the niches, and flickers feverishly around the pinnacles, and frets and fades in labyrinthine knots and shadows along the wall and roof, and yet is not satisfied, nor shall be satisfied. . . . The work of the Gothic heart is fretwork still . . ." (165; italics original).
Murphy / Nervous Tracery
There are 0 comments:
Post a Comment