Medieval faces.(Francois Villon)

About 1460 the French writer Francois Villon penned his interpretation of how his mother might have responded to the decoration of the walls of her local church: "I'm just a poor old woman/Who knows nothing and can't read./On the walls of my parish church, I see/A paradise painted with harps and lutes/And a hell where they boil the damned./One gives me great fright, the other great bliss and joy." Murals were only one way the medieval church conveyed its teachings to an overwhelmingly illiterate population. Sculpture, too, did its part to enlighten through narrative cycles illustrating episodes from the Bible; representations of saints, the Virgin, Christ, the apostles, and other religious figures; and in reliquary busts fashioned in metal or wood as receptacles for the skulls of saints.

An exhibition that chronicles the history of figural sculpture and in many cases its subsequent destruction--sometimes not long after it was created--is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City from September 26 to February 18, 2007. Set in Stone: The Face in Medieval Sculpture includes more than eighty works, half of which are drawn from the museum's collection. Fashioned from limestone, marble, polychromed wood, and silver-gilt, the objects were made in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Byzantium, and England.

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The aesthetic ideal of modeling or painting a unique expressive human face was fully realized during classical antiquity, but then almost disappeared during the Middle Ages, only to surface again in the Renaissance. According to Stephen Perkinson, the author of one of the essays in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, medieval artists and patrons were "aware of the possibility of producing images whose appearance resembled that of their human models, but they chose not to do so. This was partly a result of the belief that appearances were incapable of conveying a thing's essential nature, a widespread opinion in the early Middle Ages." Thus, since portraiture was nearly nonexistent during this period, the appearances of the great medieval philosophers, writers, and ecclesiastical and political leaders are ...