While I was studying for my master’s degree in art history, a nearby library exhibited their collection of illuminated manuscripts. They invited a prominent scholar of medieval books to write the catalogue, and in this catalogue, he attributes two of the manuscripts to women, specifically nuns. He praises the first manuscript, a fifteenth-century Rule, or monastic handbook, from the convent of St. Catherine in Nuremberg. He waxes poetic on the convent’s renowned scriptorium and describes the Rule’s paintings as “splendid and spirited.” The other manuscript is a fifteenth-century breviary, or daily devotion, commissioned by a nun at the convent of St. Mary Magdalene in Hildesheim. For that manuscript, he writes:
“It would be grossly unfair to say that if a manuscript is crudely illuminated it must have been made by women, but it is true that late medieval books made or owned by nuns are often extraordinarily naïve and rough in style.”
When I read that sentence, I did a Scooby Doo-style double take in the middle of the library. Then I went to the front desk and submitted a manuscript requisition. A semester later, I presented a rather dry if tongue-in-cheek paper about scholarship on paintings made by medieval nuns. I got an A, but even reading between the lines of my eye-rolling civility, I never answered my question, the one that got under my skin that day in the library and never left.
How did a scholar look at one manuscript and say, “This is great because it was made by women” and then look at another manuscript and say, “This is terrible because it was made by women”?
Let’s begin by acknowledging that there’s a long history of art historians saying an artwork is either great or it isn’t because its creator might have been female. In fact, the article I was introduced to in my undergraduate critical theory seminar as The Treatise on Feminist Thought vis-à-vis art history was Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In my case, my professor included this piece during the feminism week of our syllabus so he could troll us, as usual. The sum total of our discussion was him clearing his throat, reading out the title, and then saying, “There have been. Next!” I love that professor, and mostly I agree with him, but as with most things, it’s more complicated than that.
I’m not here to throw down with Linda Nochlin. That article’s over forty years old, and her main argument is a good one: that the conditions that lead to the creation of Art-with-a-capital-A are almost always the product of privilege. Her recognition of privilege does not seem to extend to art created outside Western Europe or earlier than that region’s Renaissance. Furthermore, she does not seem to find anything contradictory in claiming that women have been systematically precluded from art historical recognition while simultaneously naming off a string of highly-regarded female artists. Her stance seems to be that none of those women count because they’re not Michelangelo, and that anyone who studies them is doing “nothing to question the assumptions lying behind the question ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ On the contrary, by attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative implications.”
I disagree, but that’s okay. I find myself more sympathetic of her foibles in 1971* when I remember that as late as 1985, Margaret Miles declared that no images of women from the Middle Ages were designed or created by women.
Well, that’s not true, and I’m afraid I’m going to explain why at the risk of reinforcing negative implications. Yes, most of the “great” artists of the medieval period in Western Europe were men—or at least, we assume they were men. In the nitty-gritty of manuscript and ephemera studies, we often don’t know the name of the painter, or the scribe, or even whether they were the same person or not. Sometimes they’re only identified by their style; so, you can have cases of “This manuscript by the Master of That Other Manuscript.” From my perspective, finding a manuscript that’s definitely illuminated or transcribed by a woman isn’t so much a case of saying, Oh, wow, a woman made this, as it is saying, Someone signed this! They have a name! In truth, I don’t much care about the gender of a manuscript illuminator or scribe. I care about other people caring and why.
So let’s break down what the author of this exhibition catalogue is really saying. I think we can all agree that it was “grossly unfair” for the scholar to follow that first clause with anything other than a full stop, much less that stomach-dropping “but.” Allow me to reassure you that he doesn’t actually mean that women can’t paint; it’s just nuns. The fact that nuns are women is a coincidence.
Sarcasm aside, the scholar is referring to a type of medieval artwork called Nonnenarbeiten, or Nuns’ Works (so called by a German name because the Germans, my people, invented art history. Just roll with it.) There is a large body of frankly weird artwork made by medieval nuns, almost all personal devotional drawings or paintings of broken and bloody Jesus, flaming hearts, and the like. To modern eyes, they do look childlike. They’re often disturbing. Something you might have going for you that medieval scholars don’t is that right now you’re probably thinking, Doesn’t all medieval art look childlike and disturbing? Entire websites (and entire scholarly careers) are devoted to bizarre details from medieval manuscripts. It’s called marginalia, which basically means doodles, and it ranges from the bizarre (rocket cats?) to the offensive (for example, nuns picking penises off a penis tree.)
A chief trend in traditional art history is a compulsion to force medieval art to make sense (to us.) The theory is that medieval artists had a higher, loftier (read: religious) purpose behind the weird stuff they depicted, and they often did. Opinions are divided between people who like and don’t like medieval art. As someone who does like it, I honestly believe medieval artists didn’t depict humans the same size as castles or with eyes like giant squids because they didn’t know any better. I don’t think they didn’t care or that quality didn’t matter to them. I think—and several scholars more decorated than myself agree with me—that for medieval artists, their style, their preferences, and their objectives in creating art were simply different from ours. The trick of the art historian is to work backwards from final form and function to original intention in order to figure out what the artists’ objectives might have been.
This is where the rhetoric behind Nonnenarbeiten comes into play. While we don’t really know why some nuns made art like Nonnenarbeiten, there are a lot of theories, and theories are often a better glimpse of the art historian than the art itself. Jeffrey Hamburger is a professor at Harvard who writes beautifully about the conditions medieval nuns lived in, which is called enclosure, and how enclosure may have influenced their artwork. Theories on why Nonnenarbeiten look so strange, even against the background of generally strange medieval art, usually revolve around issues of access and agency acting on the nuns externally, such as their lack of formal artistic training or dialogue with the outside world. Not much consideration is given to what the nuns were thinking or how much of their isolation was self-imposed. For example, a convent in Wienhausen painted their own choir rather than allow men to enter their sanctuary. Hamburger argues that the Nonnenarbeiten style indicates a conscious choice on the part of the nuns to express their devotion in an unconventional yet deeply personal artistic vocabulary. Their art isn’t crude, it’s emotional; it’s not naïve, it’s intentional. It’s the solution to a problem: namely, what works for the individual nun-artist to prepare her for her desired cognitive state. The difference between Hamburger’s work and the catalogue author is that Hamburger writes about a specific community of nuns, the sisters of St. Walburg in Eichstätt, and not about nuns in general.
Nuns created artwork that varied in style, function, market, and quality, like all artists everywhere. Some nuns made private devotional drawings, and some crafted products in a variety of media for sale outside the convent. They had opinions about their work, too. In an early sixteenth-century letter to her brother, a nun in Nuremberg asks him if he would show some of her embroidery to his friend Albrecht Dürer, otherwise known as the Elvis of the northern Renaissance. In another letter she says, “I have no recreation except painting; if I could only have Dürer for a fortnight so that he could instruct [me].” (Me too, girl. Me too.)
Bizarrely, the catalogue author sometimes does acknowledge nuns’ capacity for intentional stylistic choice. In his entry for the Nuremberg manuscript, he defines Nonnenarbeiten as a “conscious avoidance of visible skill, a deliberate preference for the humility and modesty of low-grade work and a rejection of sophisticated vanity.” How can the Nuremberg nuns choose to paint badly in the name of virtue if the Hildesheim nuns can’t? Either way, the catalogue author commits a logical fallacy by generalizing the work of all nuns as Nonnenarbeiten (the name, Nuns’ Works, is misleading in this way.) He defines the art by the vocation of the artist without regard for stylistic variation. This is both a misreading of Nonnenarbeiten and a misreading of nuns. Unfortunately for the catalogue author, his argument is about to take another blow. In my examination of the two manuscripts, their provenance, and their signatures, or colophons, I found no evidence that the second, “crudely illuminated” Hildesheim manuscript was made by nuns at all.
It was commissioned and owned by a nun, but it’s a middle-class breviary, adorned with standard decoration, punched gold leaf, and sophisticated rendering of perspective and the human form. It appears to be the product of a commercial workshop—not because its quality is too high for nuns to have made it, but rather because its style is comparable to contemporaneous, commercial breviaries made in that region. The fifteenth-century wasn’t the same world as the strictly monastic book-making period that produced the Book of Kells. With the greater availability of paper, the adoption of movable type, and the rapid upward mobility of the emergent middle class after a few massive plagues and wars, the book business was booming in Europe. Commercial scriptoria were often run by families, so it is possible that a secular woman could have worked on the Hildesheim manuscript.
The Nuremberg manuscript, on the other hand, was definitely made by nuns, and the differences between it and the Hildesheim manuscript are like night and day. Whereas the Hildesheim manuscript’s pages are all vellum and the same size, neatly bound and trimmed, the Nuremberg manuscript’s pages are a mix of vellum and paper the consistency of heavy-duty paper towels. The pages are ragged and different sizes; some vellum sheets were saved for full-size paintings, but other paintings are on paper. Strikethroughs and insertions abound in the Rule, but the breviary was carefully planned, painstakingly copied out, as if its scribe were a professional. The case for the Hildesheim manuscript being a commercial product is bolstered by the fact that when the manuscript was made, the convent to which the catalogue author attributes may not have had a scriptorium on site. In short, the two manuscripts’ illustrations, handwriting, materials, and content all have absolutely nothing stylistically in common.
Okay, you may be thinking, so one of the manuscripts wasn’t made by nuns after all, but it was actually pretty well-made, while the one definitely made by nuns did have a marked difference in quality. Why? A Rule is a guidebook to all the duties expected of each member of the monastic community. In other words, it was a public document, a company handbook meant to be used and shared by many people every day, whereas the Hildesheim breviary is a distinctly personal devotional object. If either of the manuscripts were an example of Nonnenarbeiten, it would be the breviary, but it displays none of the stylistic hallmarks of the genre. On the other hand, the Nuremberg Rule was illustrated by nuns in a kooky style, but they weren’t using that style for a private devotional purpose, unlike the nuns of St. Walburg in Eichstätt. The illustrations are of the nuns gardening, attending Mass, going about their daily chores. They illustrated themselves working. One could argue that neither manuscript fits the definition of Nonnenarbeiten. The only conclusion is that the nuns used their unique style for some other reason—perhaps because they liked it.
But despite all this evidence, the catalogue author seems to have left himself a loophole in the most grating part of that rotten sentence: “…that manuscripts made or owned by nuns are often extraordinarily naïve and rough in style.” Made or owned? It’s one thing to argue that nuns make bad art because they’re not trained artists; because they’re hyper-emotional; because they’re women. It’s another to imply that at the moment they take their vows, the moment these women simultaneously renounced and calcified their femininity, medieval nuns lost all aesthetic taste. Maybe he meant that, since nuns were supposed to be poor and humble, they sought out poor and humble artworks—not true, by the way, as evidenced by sweeping monastic reforms during this period. Nuns (and monks) were sanctioned throughout the fifteenth century for bending their vows of poverty by holding personal property, earning income, and holding wealth. It makes sense; nuns were far more likely to be literate and educated than the average medieval woman. And which fifteenth-century German convent held the largest library and the wealthiest, most educated, most artistically productive nuns? The Convent of St. Catherine in Nuremberg, the creators of the Dominican Rule.
This project’s question and its potential answers have haunted me for three years, but I didn’t really get upset until about a week before my paper was due. That’s when I discovered that the Hildesheim manuscript was not, by any accepted standard of evidence, made by a woman. The catalogue author attributed it to a female scribe or painter because of its colophon, or signature: “Laus tibi sit xpiste / quem labor explicit iste / Qui perfecit eum / possit adire deum,” which he translated as: “Praise be to you, Christ: may she who completed the work which ends here be able to come to God.” Feel free to discuss this in the comments, but my classicist Scooby Gang decided a better translation might be: “Praise be to you, Christ, upon whom this work has expounded. May he who finished it be able to go up to God,” considering the masculine connotation of both “eum” and “iste” in this context. This is the catalogue author’s one and only piece of presented evidenced which he claims indicates a female scribe and possible female illuminator.
So where does that leave us? The truth is that I have no idea how to answer my question—or rather, I’m afraid of the answer. The evidence I’ve gathered leaves me with only one conclusion. A well-regarded scholar saw a manuscript that for some reason he did not like, and, devoid of any historical evidence, he equated not liking that piece to its being made by a woman.
After I gave my presentation, one person in the audience came up to talk to me. He was an older man, a non-degree-seeking student from my medieval books class, and one of my few male classmates. He told me he enjoyed my paper, but that I had mixed up two religious orders.
“When you explained what a Rule was,” he told me, “you said, ‘monastic orders, such as Franciscans.’ But the Rule you talked about were Dominicans. You can tell by the color of their robes.”
I know that, I thought. I just told you. In my presentation.
Out loud, I said, “Yes, I know. When I said Franciscans, it was just an example of a monastic order.”
He smiled and said, “Yeah, but they weren’t Franciscans. You were wrong.”
Then he turned and, whistling, left the library, climbed onto his moped with the pro-life sticker, and puttered away.
***
*Linda Nochlin wrote a follow-up piece in 2001, “‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ Thirty Years After” in Women Artists at the Millennium, which will lead you down a rabbit hole of amazing late-twentieth-century artists, so I recommend it. I also recommend the original “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” for mindful contemplation. It is widely available for free all over the internet.
Further Reading:
Jeffrey Hamburger. Nuns as Artists: the visual culture of a medieval convent. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Jeffrey Hamburger. The Visual and the Visionary: art and female spirituality in late medieval Germany. New York: Zone Books, 1998.
Carol M. Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher, Women Artists at the Millenium. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006.
Cynthia J. Cyrus. The Scribes for Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.
Michael Camille. Image on the Edge: the margins of medieval art. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Lesley Smith and Jane Taylor. Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
Tags: art, art history, artwork, feminism, medieval art, nuns, whitney burkhalter
Monk 1: So can nuns, you know, do art?
Monk 2: Oh, no, definitely not
Monk 1: Are you sure?
Monk 2: Is Jesus a creepy little man-baby? Of course I’m sure
Monk 1: Oh. Okay then
PLEASE please tell me this delightful piece was pitched after Mallory’s amazing Monks Teach Art series, because I know extremely little about art in general and yet this combined with the monks is absolutely so entertaining and amazing to me.
Two Nuns Invent Medieval Art (but Monk #2 took all the credit)
ugh moped guy ugh of course he had a moped
That said this piece was super great, thank you Whitney!
Vespa Corporation Enchants Another Slight Little Man-Child
My face when I got to that was literally just D: D: D:
But seriously, this was a great read and very illuminating.
illuminating!
🙂
Last paragraph gives me RAGE. Been there.
Well this would explain why everyone is terrible, because we were all created by women.
I love this so much!!!! Medieval art is amazing and men are garbage.
See, I see a manuscript illustration of nuns with a penis tree and write a prurient dialogue between gardening nuns, and you see the same and come up with this interesting and kick-ass piece that makes me want to invent a tripwire that I can deploy whenever I see That Dude On A Moped. You’re the best!
This is great! (As is the idea of a penis tree drawing, because penis tree.)
BRB, ordering that Kill All Men tee shirt. Again.
I GOOGLED IT HERE IT IS
Maybe she’s putting them on the tree after taking them from undeserving men?
Okay now that I got that out of the way, two requests to the author:
1) Name and address of the moped man. I intend to take off all his skin.
2) WEEKLY ARTICLES I love this it is perfect and you are perfect and rocket cat is perfect.
I love you.
I love her. Totally uniformed theory, maybe someone knows: Is this equating nuns with witches? I talked to a medievalist once who told me that witches were known for taking penises away and putting them in trees.
… To which I was like, “And the problem is…?”
BRB, e-mailing art historians who know things about both nuns and witches, because this is a FASCINATING idea!
Jumping in here because I want to know everything about this also!
Gotta go out to the dick tree, pick a peck of dicks again. THANKS, JESUS.
Perhaps Peter Pecker picked a peck of pickled peckers?
yep i’m dead now
This thread is the endgame of all that is good on the internet
So that’s where dildos come from.
wait I’m positive I saw that same illustration, but with two nuns and a very different composition. How many medieval dicktrees are there out there?
I find this absolutely fascinating. Anyone know any good books about the intellectual/artistic history of medieval convents?
HOMG. My professor wrote this book:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Uta-Codex-Philosophy-El…
Oh, this is fascinating. And I’m so happy to learn about Nonnenarbeiten, because it’s a whole ‘nother genre of outsider art for my husband to dig into.
Eeee, I’m so excited to read this, Whitney!
You guys, if you like what Whitney wrote here (and you should, and you DO), she wrote a guest post on taxidermy for my blog when I was out of the country and it’s great! She has such an evocative way of writing:
http://readinginskirts.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/g…
This was so good that the penis tree wasn’t even my only takeaway!
Whitney I LEARNED THINGS FROM THIS no one warned me I was gonna learn stuff
it was awesome
This was fantastic, Whitney! Seriously, this was so well done.
It’s amazing/depressing how almost every female scholar (but especially the ones who write about women) has an equivalent to the Derailing Dude on a Moped story. (Okay, not usually with a literal moped, which is disappointing.) I was just recently in a big conversation on Twitter with a ton of scholars, who’ve all had a Derailing Dude pull us aside after we’ve given a talk, in order to berate us. We all agreed that it’s always far worse when they pull us aside than when they challenge us publicly.
1. I LOVE THE TOAST SO MUCH IT IS AMAZING.
2. And if you look at female religious texts from the same era, a lot of the same “too emotional! too focused on a personal relationship with Jesus!” criticism gets leveled at them. (Like Marguerite de Porete and Margery Kempe.)
My response to concerns that medieval women were emotionally inappropriate with religious figures is always Bernard of Clairvaux:
Oh my stars.
WHAT. WHY.
As a medievalist feminist, I enjoy the joke that goes
Q. Why did Margery Kempe love Jesus?
A. Because he was hung (*arms held wide illustratively*) like THIS!
But you’re exactly right. The medieval women get devalued for emotionalism and sentimentalism, when emotions are totally okay in men.
Thank you forever. I will be telling this joke forever. My friends will not thank you.
It brings me SUCH JOY that this is what Moped Man will be remembered for…he really was the lit’ral worst.
Also, THIS. “A well-regarded scholar saw a manuscript that for some reason he did not like, and, devoid of any historical evidence, he equated not liking that piece to its being made by a woman.” True, sad, frustrating. I recently learned about Levina Teerlinc, who was a miniaturist under Henry VIII, and how for years and years (until the last decade of art history, seriously), scholars just assigned subpar works/works they didn’t like to her with no evidence, stylistic or otherwise.
Hi Ahhna!
It does hurt a bit whenever you realize that we are following in the footsteps of some real assholes.
It really does, right?! (But we will be better!)
This reminds me of Judith Merkle Riley’s historical novel The Serpent Garden, about a fictional female miniaturist under Henry VIII. The beginning of each section of the novel features a description of one of her works followed by a quote from a catalogue or art history book attributing it to an unknown (implied male) artist or a famous (male) artist of the day.
Love the fact that Mr Know It All mixed up his Latin translation. Therefore we can assume all naive and childish art was done by men.
I must confess that the Penis Tree was new to me. As in OMG those wild and crazy nuns. Who says women don’t have a sense of humor
OH this was an awesome read. Not just the subject itself (though it’s clear you’re super knowledgeable) but your writing style is incredibly readable and interesting and engaging. I enjoyed this a tooon.
Fantastic. More on Art History + Women, please! Also, medieval nuns are great. I sometimes like to fantasize about becoming a hermit, so convents are somewhat appealing aside from the Jesus thing. Like, if people would leave me alone to garden and illustrate things I might be pretty happy.
(late, but) for a while I had this idea of a PARTY NUNNERY that I was gonna found. Wine and whatever beverage you want pouring from aqueducts into the library. Gender non-exclusive but strict requirements re: no fucking around. Exploiting monks nearby for labor. I still think of it whenever I can’t handle MEN anymore.
This was GREAT, please continue this and the Monks Invent Art (But Not Really It Was Totally Nuns GTFO) series forever, thanks.
But who planted the penis tree?
I love this. Also, Jeffrey Hamburger is coming to my* museum next week! Imma have questions for him now.
*I don’t own it. I just work there.
So jealous! I got a mass email from him a couple of years ago about a petition, and as soon as I saw From: Jeffrey Hamburger I started screaming. #arthistoryproblems
Seriously though, he’s super nice.
I’m not a medievalist (18th century 4LYFE) so I’d not actually heard of him till fairly recently, but because of his name I envisaged him as The Hamburglar from Happy Meals.
*waves enthusiastically* PhD student working on late medieval German art over here…just wanted to say hello, fellow member of this very small club and thanks for the piece!
B 🙂
B-}
*peels out in scooter*
I know the Penis Tree is the flashy aside here, but let’s not overlook this passage, which is the best:
“…Albrecht Dürer, otherwise known as the Elvis of the northern Renaissance. In another letter she says, “I have no recreation except painting; if I could only have Dürer for a fortnight so that he could instruct [me].” (Me too, girl. Me too.)”
This is great–thanks!
Hi Whit! Love this! More please.
In different forms, this is something that I run into in my own readings… people trip over themselves trying to explain away “problems” of “quality” as lack of skill/tech/penis because somehow they cannot imagine that something Not to Their Taste could have been done ON PURPOSE, for reasons other than the writer’s own. Failure of the imagination.
Also your summation of that theory class was sterling LOL/SOB
Ugh, I had this exact problem with a male art history professor. He pointed out the only work in the gallery by a female impressionist and criticised the quality — when it was pretty clearly also the only work in the room that was genuinely painted en plein air (outdoors, on site) and not a studio-finished work based off sketches and models.
But of course, according to him, the roughness of the piece was lack of skill due to her vagina interfering with her artistic sensibilities and not, you know, a skilled artist painting fast in order to capture the moment, the changing light and colour quickly in an outdoor scene full of people moving.
Because he couldn’t even think of the possibility that a female artist could be committed to the ideology and philosophy of capturing a moment, even if that meant sacrificing skill and finished quality for a pure artistic vision. Because if he’d accepted that idea, he would have had to point out how so many of the male impressionists betrayed their youthful ideology to fake the impressionist style in well finished studio painted works for commercial purposes, and the inherent academic dishonesty in comparing any work painted en plein air with works painted mostly indoors, in a studio.
Not that I have any problem with them making a living our of their art, but too many art historians gloss over the way many male impressionists (and many other young male rebels) stopped rebelling against the establishment the minute they became successful and seamlessly become part of the establishment instead.
ah man medieval ladies making art makes me so excited! i’m studying early medieval art in england right now, and there’s definitely evidence for women making art in southumbria, which is amazing bc everyone assumes that all the scribes were monks.
Hello! I’m a librarian with a BA in Medieval Studies–I focused quite a bit on female mystics and mysticism, and I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed reading this, and seeing “popular” scholarship on this topic in general. There needs to be more awareness of how our current societal issues with gender are instructing critical readings of the past. Anyway, this makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I know you’re focused on art, but you should check out the vita of Christina Mirabilis if you want some truly fascinating stuff–of course it’s written by a man, but she does some crazy things and doesn’t really give a flip. It’s wonderful (let’s be best friends).
I AM SO IN LOVE RIGHT NOW
I did a BA in History of Art, split between SOAS and UCL, so I could you about the ignorant to downright vicious things white dude Victorian colonials told the world about Medieval South Asian and South East Asian Art (they probably smugly rode away on penny farthings though).
No, but like, we didn’t do much on western Medieval art, save for this one class delivered by an ornery bespectacled black-haired guest lecturer with a voice like Brindlegorm Cumberthatch. He showed us this beautiful light-filled Northern Renaissance cathedral and said, ‘Now this. This place. I want you to imagine yourself there, and not in a shitty lecture theatre in Bloomsbury.’ He was good, but we didn’t learn a single thing about women.
Later on I read a book on Medieval Women by Henrietta Leyser, which I liked – lots of delicious sources – and she doesn’t mince her words when calling out patriarchal bullshit. She positions the devotion of nuns to Jesus as deeply sensual, which I found fascinating and beautiful. I wanted to know more about these women.
So I am really glad to see this here! The idea that nuns painted in the way they did simply because THEY FUCKEN FELT LIKE IT deeply pleases me.
Nun 1: like why are you painting flaming hearts on that vellum
Nun 2: uhm because they’re rad
Nun 1: oh
ok
While that does sound like a nice thing to imagine, I like Bloomsbury! (Currently work in Russell Square, about to start a master’s at UCL.) There are worse places to be.
My boyfriend had Henrietta Leyser as a tutor at university, and he owns that book – I have been meaning to read it for ages, so thanks for the reminder.
The Germans invited art history? I didn’t know that Vasari was German.
This is such a great piece, I love it.
This is such a great piece, I love it.
OMFG
Love this
As a Roman Retread (former Roman Catholic now Episcopalian) who has a strictly layman’s interest in art history (and a lust-filled-longing-for desire for up-close-and-personal access to thed Book of Kells) this article really tickles my fancy.
Oh, and in regards to the catlog-guy and moped guy, it is *so* tempting to go #notallmen, but it really does illustrate the assumtion of priveldge sooo well.
1. OH GOD MOPED GUY
2. It’s sort of funny that people keep making a big deal about nonnenarbeiten as being about intensely personal and private art; if anything the most classically “nonnenarbeiten” works you’re pointing out(the Wienhausen choir stalls and the Rule) are specifically communal works; that is works used by the community as a whole(all the nuns who used that choir and the community that used the Rule). Is that just a function of the examples you pointed out or is this a broader pattern?
Whitney, you’re a ruddy genius. I’m supposed to be organising a feminist-y festival- but a friend sent me a link to History of Women Listening to Men in Art. Over an hour ago. I laughed so much my 7 year old son got perturbed and I had to go out of the room for a bit.