The Heroic Age of Gothic and the Metaphors of Modernism

Abstract

This article, which was first presented as a lecture, sets out some broad ideas about the domain of the aesthetic in medieval art and architecture. At its heart is a critique of common assumptions about mimesis, hermeneutics, and univalent categories. Beginning with the issue of levels of style, it argues that recent debates have tended to sever discussion of “low” or everyday forms from balanced consideration of “high” or lofty forms that are more usefully understood in relation to one another. The notion of the heroic—great deeds and accomplishments—is taken as a starting point for the proposal that formalist discussions of medieval art overlook or actually obscure deeper continuities between the Christian Middle Ages and wonders in the ancient and Islamic worlds. Ideas of lofty farsightedness and the difficulty of invention itself are seen as part of a continuum with the poetics and rhetoric of Antiquity. Doubt is cast on the validity of modernist metaphors for style and also on epistemologically modern categories of marginality that overlook the necessary connection between high and low style and displace pleasure and the aesthetic. Stress is placed instead on the linked and dialogic character of the senses and the media in medieval art. Finally, the aesthetics of wonder and the affective techniques of artists are discussed with a view to opening a new debate about the transformative role of art and architecture.

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