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The Mystic Ark: Hugh of Saint Victor, art, and thought in the twelfth century

2014; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 52; Issue: 04 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5860/choice.185846

1943-5975

Conrad Rudolph,

Byzantine Studies and History

In the medieval sources, works of art are rarely referred to, let alone described in any detail.When they are mentioned, it is seldom with more than a word or a phrase, at the most a sentence.Almost completely ignored by art historians because of the immense difficulty of its text, Hugh of Saint Victor's Mystic Ark is a forty-two page description of the most complex individual work of figural art of the entire Middle Ages, a painting also known as The Mystic Ark, making both the text and the painting among the most unusual sources we have for an understanding of medieval visual culture and its polemical context.The purpose of the painting was to serve as the basis of a series of brilliant lectures undertaken by Hugh--who was considered to be the leading theologian of Europe during his life--from around 1125 to 1130 at Saint Victor, a Parisian abbey of Augustinian canons, whose school acted as a predecessor of the University of Paris.The purpose of the text was to enable others outside of Saint Victor--teachers, students, scholars, monks, canons--to undertake similar weeks-long discussions themselves by providing the information necessary to produce the image, an image that was meant to be repeated again and again, each new construction in a sense being an "original."Given the unusually large number of surviving manuscript copies of The Mystic Ark--enough to make it the medieval equivalent of a best-seller--it seems that The Mystic Ark was very successful at addressing a widely and urgently felt need among a great part of the educated elite of Western Europe during a period of significant intellectual change.The time was the renaissance of the twelfth century, a period of great theological inquiry in which, among other things, the very authority of divine revelation was challenged on the most fundamental level.One of the great struggles of the renaissance of the twelfth century was that between the "old theology," an experiential theology of blind faith that is best represented by Bernard of Clairvaux and traditional monasticism, and the "new theology," a theology of inquiry whose faith was based on logic that is best represented by Abelard and the neoplatonic circles.Among other things, these two parties argued over the questions of to what degree worldly knowledge (the liberal arts) was permissible in the search for spiritual knowledge, and whether the greatest proponents of worldly knowledge (the pagan philosophers) should be studied.One of the most pressing issues in this regard was the theory of initial creation and the continued