Maintenance Work and the Long Life of Materials in Medieval Art
2023; College Art Association; Volume: 105; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00043079.2023.2176644
ISSN1559-6478
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural Heritage Materials Analysis
ResumoAbstractThis article explores an important aspect of artworks overlooked by art historians: their gradual material deterioration and the measures taken to slow this process of decay. It focuses on one extraordinarily detailed set of maintenance instructions set down by an early sixteenth-century English bishop. Drawing out some of the key themes from this maintenance program (its ritual performance, its analogies with medicine, its philosophical stakes) and placing them in dialogue with surviving artworks, I argue that maintenance work offers an instructive new perspective from which to consider the material turn, as well as a deeper point of connection between art history and conservation. NotesI wish to acknowledge the support of the archivists at the Archives Départementales de la Seine-Maritime in Rouen; All Souls’ and New College, Oxford; the District Record Office in Chichester; and Winchester College. Without their willingness to search out and send me documents during lockdown, this research would have stalled during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gerrit Vanhoeven provided invaluable assistance in transcribing and translating the Rouen document. Thanks to Allison Stielau, who accompanied me on a memorable road trip to see the tomb-box in Kenz in 2018, and to Jack Hartnell for discussing the medical illustration in Edinburgh MS 169. I am also immensely grateful to Douglas Brine and Julian Munby for generously sharing unpublished drafts of their research. As I revised the text for publication, Douglas Brine, Simon Dell, Julian Luxford, and Margit Thøfner provided me with invaluable feedback. Also critical to the final version were the comments of the anonymous peer reviewers and the editor of The Art Bulletin: for their careful reading of my work, I am extremely grateful. The expertise and tenacity of my image researcher, Karin Kyburz, was critical in securing the illustrations for this article. Finally, my greatest thanks go to Ed Krčma, whose enthusiasm for maintenance work and insights into the broader stakes of the subject provided me with the impetus to begin, and persist with, this project.Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.1 “Omnia corrumpuntur et tabefiunt in tempore,” transcribed and translated in F. G. Bennett, R. H. Codrington, and C. Deedes, eds., Statutes and Constitutions of the Cathedral Church of Chichester (Chichester: Charles Knight, 1904), 63. All further quotations from documents in Bennett, Codrington, and Deedes follow their English translations.2 Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 14. See also the discussion of this essay in Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 165–67, 189–90; and Caroline Fowler, “Technical Art History as Method,” The Art Bulletin 101, no. 4 (2019): 10.3 Panofsky, “Humanistic Discipline,” 14–15n11.4 See the brief comment on aging made by Walter Benjamin: aging attests to the duration of the artwork, the “time of its existence,” and so is an aspect that cannot be reproduced. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 3.5 Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” trans. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo, in “Monuments/Memory,” ed. Forster, special issue, Oppositions: A Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture, no. 25 (1982): 21–51. For a discussion of this essay in relation to conservation theory, see Fowler, “Technical Art History,” 9. For Panofsky’s debt to Riegl, see Holly, Foundations of Art History, 69–96.6 Riegl, “Modern Cult of Monuments,” 33; see also 24.7 Ibid.8 Ibid., 29.9 Ibid., 23.10 Ibid., 34.11 Panofsky, “Humanistic Discipline,” 14; and Riegl, “Modern Cult of Monuments,” 34.12 Panofsky, “Humanistic Discipline,” 14n11.13 Michael Ann Holly in “Notes from the Field: Materiality,” The Art Bulletin 95, no. 1 (2013): 15–16. See also the other essays in this special feature, especially the contributions by Caroline Walker Bynum and Monica Wagner. For an account of the material turn and its intersection with other trends in art history, see Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop, and Pamela H. Smith, “Introduction,” in The Matter of Art: Materials, Practices and Cultural Logics, ed. Anderson, Dunlop, and Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 1–17. For other influential writings on materiality, see Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone Books, 2000); Paul Graves-Brown, ed., Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 2000); and Tim Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2007): 1–16.14 For studies of various materials and their qualities in the medieval and early modern periods, see, for instance, the essays in Anderson, Dunlop, and Smith, Matter of Art; Joseph Ackley, “Copper-Alloy Substrates in Precious-Metal Treasury Objects: Concealed and Yet Excessive,” Different Visions: New Perspectives on Medieval Art 4 (2014): 1–34; Marian Bleeke, “Ivory and Whiteness,” Different Visions: New Perspectives on Medieval Art 6 (2020): 1–23; Fabio Barry, Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2020); Gregory C. Bryda, “The Exuding Wood of the Cross at Isenheim,” The Art Bulletin 100, no. 2 (2018): 6–36; Brigitte Buettner, The Mineral and the Visual: Precious Stones in Medieval Visual Culture (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2022); Jeffrey J. Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Caroline Fowler, The Art of Paper: From the Holy Land to the Americas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019); Stefania Gerevini, “Christus Crystallus: Rock Crystal, Theology and Materiality in the Medieval West,” in Matter of Faith. An Interdisciplinary Study of Relics and Reliquaries, ed. James Robinson, Lloyd De Beer, and Anna Harnden (London: British Museum Press, 2014), 92–99; Sarah M. Guérin, French Gothic Ivories: Material Theologies and the Sculptor’s Craft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); Cynthia Hahn, The Reliquary Effect: Enshrining the Sacred Object (London: Reaktion Press, 2017); Karen Overbey, “Seeing through Stone: Materiality and Place in a Late-Medieval Scottish Reliquary,” RES, 65/66 (2014/2015): 242–58; Ulinka Rublack, “Matter in the Material Renaissance,” Past and Present, no. 219 (2013): 41–85; Nancy K. Turner, “The Materiality of Medieval Parchment: A Response to ‘The Animal Turn,’” Revista Hispánica Moderna 71, no. 1 (2018): 39–67; Turner, “Surface Effect and Substance: Precious Metals in Illuminated Manuscripts,” in Illuminating Metalwork: Metal, Object and Image in Medieval Manuscripts, ed. Ackley and Shannon Wearing (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), 51–112; Ittai Weinryb, The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Weinryb, “Living Matter: Materiality, Maker and Ornament in the Middle Ages,” Gesta 52, no. 2 (2013): 13–32.15 See, for instance, Karen Overbey, “Reflections on the Surface, or, Notes for a Tantric Art History,” in Transparent Things: A Cabinet, ed. Maggie M. Williams and Overbey (New York: Punctum Books, 2013), 1–15.16 See, for instance, Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2015), as well as the historiographical discussion by Aden Kumler, “Materials, Materia, Materiality,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, 2nd ed., ed. Conrad Rudolph (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2019), 95–118.17 This characterisation of the mutual entanglement between making and materials is indebted to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and phenomenology. See, for instance, the discussions in Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak, “Mutually Contextual: Materials, Bodies, and Objects,” in Cultural Histories of the Material World, ed. Peter N. Miller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 48–49; Paul Binski, Gothic Sculpture (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2019), 171–73, 188; and Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” 9, 13–14.18 Bedos-Rezak, “Mutually Contextual,” 49. Ingold also touches on the issue of decay and degradation to argue that “materials always and inevitably win out over materiality”—since there is no such thing as a finished object (Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” 9–10).19 For alabaster’s material fragility and its association with flesh, see Binski, Gothic Sculpture, 181–85; Rachel Dressler, “Identity, Status, and Material: Medieval Alabaster Effigies in England,” Peregrinations 5, no. 2 (2015): 77, 85–86; and Kim Woods, Cut in Alabaster: A Material of Sculpture and Its European Traditions (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2018), 8, 146–48.20 For an example of later layers of polychromy on wood sculpture closely replicating the original colors, suggesting repainting as maintenance work, see Ernst Willemsen, “Farbige Bildwerke des Mittelaltars im Rheninland,” Deutsche Kunst und Denkmalpflege 25, no. 2 (1967): 88.21 “in suo decore ac integritate permaneat.” “Certificate of the Official of Rouen citing a decree of Archbishop Raoul Roussel of Rouen dated September 28, 1448, about the execution of the last will of John, Regent of France, Duke of Bedford, by the executors appointed in his testament,” doc. 5573, série G, 3573, “Fondation du duc de Bedford,” Archives Départementales de la Seine-Maritime Rouen. This unpublished document will be discussed in more detail below.22 See, for instance, Manfred Koller, “Learning from the History of Preventive Conservation,” Studies in Conservation 39, sup. 2 (1994): 1–7; Simon Lambert, “Italy and the History of Preventive Conservation,” CeROART, EGG 1 (2010), https://doi.org/10.4000/ceroart.1707; Michelle D. Marincola and Lucretia Kargère, The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture: History, Theory, Practice (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2020), 107–113; and Johannes Taubert, Polychrome Sculpture: Meaning, Form, Conservation, ed. Marincola, trans. Carola Kleinstück-Schulman (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2015). First published in German in 1978.23 For recent interdisciplinary work on the history of conservation see the Cultures of Conservation research initiative at the Bard Graduate Center in New York, which ran from 2012–22, and associated publications, especially Peter N. Miller and Soon Kai Poh, eds., Conserving Active Matter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). See also Fowler, “Technical Art History”; and Zachary Stewart, “Tending the Architectural Corpus: A Prehistory,” in “Preserve,” special issue, Journal of Architectural Education 72, no. 2 (2018): 290–93.24 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!,” in Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, ed. Larissa Harris and Patricia C. Phillips (New York: DelMonico Books, 2016), 210–11.25 For the medieval uses of the modern word “maintain,” see the entry for “maintē˘nen” in the Middle English Compendium, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary; and the entries for “maintenir” and “maintenour” in the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, https://anglo-norman.net/.26 A transcription and translation of some of the texts that comprise the Ordinances is published in Bennett, Codrington, and Deedes, Statutes and Constitutions, 54–91. Their version is based on two copies of the book now held in the District Record Office in Chichester (Cap/1/14/2 and Cap/1/14/3).27 “Certificate of the Official of Rouen.”28 As Riegl points out, such commemorative monuments are bound up with claims to an “eternal present,” and thus natural processes of decay militate against the fulfilment of its claims. Riegl, “Modern Cult of Monuments,” 38.29 For Robert Sherborn’s life and career, see A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to AD 1500, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 1685–87; Christopher Harper-Bill, “Sherborn, Robert (c. 1454–1536),” The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2011), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/25357; and Francis W. Steer, Robert Sherburne, Bishop of Chichester: Some Aspects of His Life Reconsidered (Chichester, UK: Chichester District Council, 1960).30 In 1507 (one year before Sherborn’s arrival) seven cases were heard; in 1520, Sherborn’s officers brought seventy-one cases. Ken Carleton, “Robert Sherborn and the Role of the Bishop in the Promotion of Material Culture,” in Chichester: The Palace and Its Bishops, ed. Paul Foster and Rachel Moriarty (Chichester, UK: University of Chichester, 2011), 143.31 “nos multum et in persona et ministris laborasse, ut ecclesia Cicestrie a veteri squalor . . . reduceretur.” “Epistle of the Lord Robert the Fourth, a Humble Minister of the Church of Chichester, to His Successors (Aldingbourne, 1 November 1529),” in Bennett, Codrington, and Deedes, Statutes and Constitutions, 77–78.32 Ruth Chavasse, “The Bishops’ Portrait Medallions in Their Renaissance and Reformation Context: A Note on Episcopal Authority as Interpreted by Bishop Sherborn and Lambert Barnard,” in Foster and Moriarty, Palace and Its Bishops, 159–66; Karen Coke, “Bishop Robert Sherborn and Lambert Barnard: An English Response to Italian Pictorial Practice?,” in Foster and Moriarty, Palace and Its Bishops, 146–58; Coke, “Lambert Barnard, Bishop Shirborne’s ‘Paynter,’” in Art, Literature and Religion in Early Modern Sussex: Culture and Conflict, ed. Matthew Dimmock, Andrew Hadfield, and Paul Quinn (London: Routledge, 2014), 61–94; and Jonathan Woolfson and Deborah Lush, “Lambert Barnard in Chichester Cathedral: Ecclesiastical Politics and the Tudor Royal Image,” The Antiquaries Journal 87 (2007): 259–80.33 “quam graminibus predicte quadrate, viz., ab omnibus lapidibus, urticis, et aliis nocivis ad gramina germinanda predicta infra circuitum dicte quadrate; preterea ad observanda ipsa gramina ut sint munda plana et curta: etiam dicta persona sic electa defalcabit gramina in gardino communi crescentia et custodiet sepes bene et decenter cesas.” “Statutes of the Vicars Choral of Chichester (1534),” in Bennett, Codrington, and Deedes, Statutes and Constitutions, 90.34 “Sir William Fitzwilliam to Cardinal Wolsey, 3 August 1526,” in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, vol. 4, ed. J. S. Brewer (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1875), 1058.35 Sherborn himself referred to the book as “the great register of our time, in which our Acts are written.” Bennett, Codrington, and Deedes, Statutes and Constitutions, 62.36 Five copies are held in Chichester (Chichester, District Record Office, Cap/1/14/1; Cap/1/14/2; Cap/1/14/3; Cap 1/14/5; and Epis. I/1/6 which survives only as a palimpsest, identifiable because some folios were remade into bindings). One copy is at Winchester College (CollBMW II 168). Two are in New College, University of Oxford (New College MS 131; New College Archives MS 9432). All eight surviving copies of the book have slightly different contents as well as slight differences in the texts themselves, as detailed in C. E. Welch, “Bishop Sherburne of Chichester and his ‘Donations,’” Notes and Queries 199 (May 1954): 91–93.37 The three surviving display copies are Chichester Cap/1/14/15; New College Archives MS 9432, University of Oxford; Winchester CollBMW II 168. They include a new indenture drawn up between the Dean and Chapter of Chichester and New College in August 1531. See Welch, “Donations,” 192.38 Many thanks to Julian Munby for sharing his unpublished contents and collation of the eight manuscripts.39 This section is transcribed and translated in Bennett, Codrington, and Deedes, Statutes and Constitutions, 54–77.40 “because we see plain to the eye that many of the jewels assigned by our predecessors for the honor of God and adornment of the Church have been lost by neglect.” Bennett, Codrington, and Deedes, Statutes and Constitutions, 6141 For Sherborn’s occupation as scribe (secretary) to the University of Oxford, a position that he held between ca. 1480 and 1486, see J. I. Catto, “Scholars and Studies in Renaissance Oxford,” in A History of the University of Oxford, vol. 2, Late Medieval Oxford, ed. Catto and T. A. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 780.42 Bennett, Codrington, and Deedes, Statutes and Constitutions, 63. Sherborn’s keen interest in the archive—its contents as well as its physical properties—is also evidenced by the fact he added marginal notes to several documents in the archives of Chichester Cathedral (Steer, Sherburne, 11).43 Bennett, Codrington, and Deedes, Statutes and Constitutions, 63.44 Two copies with original bindings are at Chichester, District Record Office, Cap 1/14/1; Cap 1/14/2 (albeit repaired in May 1936 by T. E. Hassel). The others are New College MS 313, University of Oxford; and New College Archives MS 9432, University of Oxford.45 The mixed paper and parchment copies are Chichester, District Record Office Cap1/14/2 (dated 1526–31); Cap1/14/3 (dated 1529–31). The selection of texts they contain identifies them as a second version of the Book of Ordinances, also represented by New College MS 313, University of Oxford. Puzzlingly, the paper and parchment leaves do not follow a discernible pattern within the quire structure but are instead interspersed throughout. Cap1/14/2 is predominantly parchment with additional paper leaves, whereas the ratio is inverted for Cap1/14/3, which is predominantly made from paper. See Welch, “Donations,” 192. For the practice of mixed paper and parchment books in late medieval England, see Christopher de Hamel, Making Medieval Manuscripts (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2018), 38–41; and Orietta Da Rold, Paper in Medieval England: From Pulp to Fictions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 161–70.46 Sherborn also orders four additional copies of the foundation statutes to be transcribed into books owned by each prebendary. Bennett, Codrington, and Deedes, Statutes and Constitutions, 62.47 “ne pereat memoria cum sonitu, vel potius sine sonitu sileat.” Bennett, Codrington, and Deedes, Statutes and Ordinances, 62. Adapted from Psalm 9:7 (“periit memoria eorum cum sonitu”).48 See Aristotle, Politics, bk. 1, ch. 8, trans. Ernest Barker, rev. R. F. Stalley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 21–24. For a discussion of the increasing importance of the idea of household maintenance in fifteenth-century England and its influence on literature, see D. Vance Smith, Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). For the rising tide of objects owned by households in late medieval London and the concurrent need to maintain these objects, see Katherine L. French, Household Goods and Good Households: Consumption and Domesticity after the Plague (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 99–127.49 Emden, Biographical Register, 1685. Sherborn also graduated with a BA and an MA.50 “Eripe me de morte”/ “Egris salus revertitur.” Medica Secundum Scholam Salernitanam, MS 169, fol. 2v, Edinburgh University Library Collections, Edinburgh.51 For an English translation, see Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum, Code of Health of the School of Salernum, trans. John Ordronaux (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1870).52 Joel Kaye, A History of Balance, 1250–1375: The Emergence of a New Model of Equilibrium and Its Impact on Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 162–72; Carole Rawcliffe, Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England (Stroud: Allan Sutton, 1995), 37–42; and Pedro Gil Sotres, “The Regimens of Health,” in Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, ed. Mirko D. Grmek, trans. Antony Shugaar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 291–318. For the continuing currency of these ideas in the sixteenth century, see Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 154–209.53 Stewart, “Tending the Architectural Corpus,” 291.54 For Sherborn’s tomb, see H. A. Tummers “The Medieval Effigial Tombs at Chichester Cathedral,” Church Monuments 3 (1988): 22–26; and Tummers, “Church Monuments,” in Chichester Cathedral: An Historical Survey, ed. Mary Hobbs (Chichester: Phillimore, 1994), 203–5.55 “arcus super sepulturam nostrum quam altare et locus ipse munde et honeste custodiantur.” Bennett, Codrington, and Deedes, Statutes and Constitutions, 60.56 “quam imago nostra de alabastro facta de tempore in tempus a telis aranearum pulveribus et aliis immundiciis purgentur, et purgata semper teneantur, quodque pannus imagini nostre appensus, quotiens opus fuerit renovetur, extendatur et implicetur pro temporum conditione, id est quando serenum vel festum est discooperiatur, quando ecclesia purgatur vel tenebrose nebule erunt, aut aerem spissari, aut crebros humores superhabundare contigerit, cooperiatur.” Bennett, Codrington, and Deedes, Statutes and Constitutions, 60.57 For the material vulnerability of alabaster, its softness and extreme sensitivity to water and heat, see Miguel González de Quevedo Ibañez, Thomas Hildenbrand, and Harald Theiss, “Materials and Working Methods: A Technical Analysis of the Rimini Altarpiece—Experiments with Sculptural Techniques—Studies on Surface Finishing and Polychromy in Medieval Alabaster Sculpture,” in Mission Rimini: Material, History, Conservation: The Rimini Altarpiece, ed. Stefan Roller and Theiss (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2021), 77–78, 82, 93, 100, 123–24; and in the same volume, Wolfram Kloppman, “Alabaster: The Material of the Rimini Workshop and Its Origins,” 73.58 “Quant est de alabastre, il ne dure pas la moitié; car marbre peut durer mil ans bel, meiz non pas blanc, et l’alebastre ne saroit durer quatre cens ans, non pas trois.” Perréal’s letter is dated January 1511. Marie-Françoise Poiret, “Marbres et albâtres dans l’église de Brou (Bourg-en-Bresse),” in Marbres en Franche-Comté, actes des journées d’études de Besançon, ed. Laurent Poupard and Annick Richard (Besançon, France: ASPRODIC, 2003), 101. See also Woods, Cut in Alabaster, 202–14.59 “car les aultres ne se polissent point si bien et ne gardent point leur blancheur; ains se jaulnissent à la longe.” Colombe’s letter is dated December 1511. Poiret, “Marbres et albâtres,” 91. For an English translation of Colombe’s letter, see Wolfgang Stechow, Northern Renaissance Art, 1400–1600: Sources and Documents (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 146–50.60 “Aperiatur tabula solum in festo nativitatis domini, pasche, penthecostes et duobus diebus sequentibus, ascensionis, trinitatis, omnium sanctorum, epiphanie domini, corporis Christi, dedicationis ecclesie ac in omnibus festivitatibus beate Marie virginis. Eo die mox finitis vesperis secundis claudatur. Et omni anno binies mundetur. Et ne magna lumina super altare propter fumum. Sufficiunt duo parve candele de cera. Alie vero extra altare locentur.” (The altarpiece is to be opened only on the festivals of the Nativity, Easter, Pentecost, and the two days following, Ascension, Trinity, All Saints, Epiphany, Corpus Christi, and the Dedication of the Convent’s Church, and all festivals of the blessed Virgin Mary. On the day of the festival it is to be closed straight after the second Vespers. Twice every year it is to be cleaned. And there are not to be large lights on the altar, on account of the smoke: two small wax candles are enough, and any others should be placed away from the altar.). Andreas’s instructions are dated 1523. R. Schaffer, “Zur Frage der Bemalung von Schnitzwerken,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 28 (1928): 361–62. The English translation quoted above is taken from Susie Nash, Northern Renaissance Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 229.61 The cover was donated to St. Lorenz church in February 1519 by the patron of the sculpture, Anton II Tucher. See Gudrun Litz, “Nuremberg et l’absence d’iconoclasme,” in Iconoclasme: Vie et mort de l’image médiévale, exh. cat. (Paris: Somogy, 2001), 94–95.62 Although earlier instances of unveiling and cleaning are not documented, it is likely that they corresponded to the liturgical calendar. Based on the timing of Tucher’s donations to other rosary images, Johannes Tripps suggests that such maintenance work would have taken place on the feasts of the Annunciation, Ascension, and Birth of the Virgin, as well as Christmas. Tripps, “Bildwerk und Hülle. Funde zur Inszenierung spätgotischer Plastik und Skulptur am Vorabend der Reformation,” in Die Spätgotische Skulptur Freiburgs i. Ue. im europäischen Kontext, ed. Katharina Simon-Muscheid and Stefan Gasser (Fribourg: Société d’histoire du canton de Fribourg, 2009), 387–89. See also Marincola and Kargère, Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture, 108–9; and Taubert, Polychrome Sculpture, 73.63 As described in the cathedral chapter records, the royal tombs in the choir of Rouen Cathedral were uncovered for special events such as the baptism of the son of the Duke of York on May 18, 1443; a provincial council on November 23, 1445; and the ceremonial reception of the count of Dorset on May 8, 1448. Charles de Beaurepaire, Fondations pieuses du duc de Bedford à Rouen (Nogent-le-Rotrou: A. Gouverneur, 1873), 352.64 Marc Gil and Ludovic Lys, Saint-Omer gothique: Les arts figuratifs á la fin du Moyen Age, 1250–1550 (Valenciennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, 2004), 89–91, 104nn56–57, 104n61. Many thanks to Douglas Brine for sharing this reference with me.65 Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 79–80. Nagel and Wood use this term in the context of the periodic overpainting of panel paintings, but their arguments are also relevant to more ephemeral forms of maintenance work.66 “diligentius corpus mortuum sepulchro claudunt forti, et operiunt, seu ornant picto, dum quicquid rugosum, et foetidum est, quantum possibile est, albissimis epistyliis tegunt, et pulchris coloribus pingunt. . . . Quia sicut lapis ille exterius politus, pulcher et pictus, interius plenus est foetoribus.” John Bromyard, Summa Praedicantium (Venice, 1586), pt. 1, ch. 7, 461, col. 1. See also Peter Binkley, “Bromyard, John (d. ca. 1352),” in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/3521.67 Frederic Amory, “Whited Sepulchres: The Semantic History of Hypocrisy in the High Middle Ages,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 53 (1986): 8. For the rhetorical image of the “tomb beautiful,” see also Binski, Gothic Sculpture, 227; and Mary Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 184.68 Among the extensive literature on transi tombs, see Jessica Barker, “Stone and Bone: The Corpse, the Effigy and the Viewer in Late-Medieval England,” in Revisiting the Monument: Fifty Years after Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture, ed. Ann Adams and Barker (London: Courtauld Books Online, 2016), 113–36; Marisa Bass, “The Transi Tomb and the ‘Genius’ of Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Sculpture,” Netherlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 67 (2017): 161–87; Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (London: British Museum, 1996), 139–52; Kathleen Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Ashby Kinch, Imago Mortis: Mediating Images of Death in Late-Medieval Culture (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2013), 145–84; Pamela King, “Contexts of the Cadaver Tomb in Fifteenth-Century England” (PhD diss., University of York, 1987); Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1964), 64–65; and Stephen Perkinson, The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 145–46.69 Woods, Cut in Alabaster, 202–14.70 Poiret, “Marbres et albâtres,” 91, 101.71 Albert Gümbel, ed., Das Mesnerpflichtbuch von. St Lorenz in Nürnberg vom Jahre 1493 (Munich: Kaiser, 1928). See the discussion in Nash, Northern Renaissance Art, 239–41.72 Marincola and Kargère, Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture, 20.73 Churchwardens’ Accounts of Ashburton, 1479–1580, ed. Alison Hanham (Torquay: Devonshire Press, 1970), 89–119. See also Agnese Sartor, “Space and Community in the Medieval Parish Church: St Andrew in Ashburton,” Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association, 155 (2023).74 “Paié à Jehan le Courtois orfeure pour avoir netoié et esclarchi les capitiaux et pillars de laton qui sont la tombe du Roy, par marchie faict—xii s.” The monument in question marked the burial of the heart of Charles V (d. 1380) and had been commissioned from the sculptor Jean de Liége in 1368. Achille Deville, Tombeaux de la cathédral de Rouen (Rouen: Periaux, 1837), 184.75 An entry in the account book of the vice Dombaumeister and Kammermeister, dated 1549, reads: “Benedict Khölbl Stainmesz hat jarlichen von wegen wartung und sauberung gedachts Khaiser Fridrichen Grabstain zu sannd Steffans Tuembkhirchen zu Wienn—für ein Hofclaidt acht pfund pfening.” Cited in Hans Tietze, Geschichte und Beschreibung des St. Stephans-Domes in Wien (Vienna: Filser-Verlag, 1931), 467. See also Alois Kies
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