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COPYRIGHT 1998 College Art Association
Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1996. 224 pp.; 11 color ills., 89 b/w. $39.95
The universal phenomenon of death would seem to have no history, but we have learned better. Since the 1919 publication of Johan Huizinga's Autumn of the Middle Ages (recently reissued in a new and full translation by the University of Chicago Press), "The Vision of Death" has come to be associated quite closely with late medieval culture of the 14th and 15th centuries, shadowed by the outbreak of the Black Death in Europe. The two books under consideration here build knowledgeably for the same period upon the foundations of Huizinga and others, including the fuller history of death in the West by Philippe Aries, Hour of Our Death (1981). Perhaps in our own fin-de-siecle era of the AIDS pandemic we are better poised to appreciate the specter of unexplained, sometimes sudden, premature death within society.
Camille's book (which begins with a quotation and a general historiographic assessment of Huizinga in an attempt to reverse the inherited autumnal imagery and see "the carrying back of death into life") offers a case study, "the lifeless art of Pierre Remiet, illuminator." It forms a fitting instance of the ongoing studies by this leading younger scholar of medieval life and culture through manuscripts and their visual signs. Camille, professor at the University of Chicago, has already considered medieval visual imagery in his Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (1989) and Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (1992). His subject here is a single (and single-minded), previously unknown Parisian illuminator of the late 14th century who specialized in the macabre.
Remiet offers a postmodern version of microhistory, an imbedded and contingent biography for a single figure, a mere illustrator emphatically from the artisan class rather than the elite, who emerges out of anonymity in a period that also first saw the "early modern" emergence of the individual, albeit usually from the stratum de viris illustribus. As with other postmodern appreciations of reference and mechanical reproduction, Camille sympathizes with the repetitive, unoriginal quality of Remiet's often copied output as a hallmark of its embeddedness in late medieval work and culture. Along the way he adds a critique to the traditional methodology of previous manuscript scholarship (and bookselling), which places emphasis on individual style ("hands") and group activity ("workshops"), even as he makes his own (self-conscious, almost ironic) distinctions of individuation for Remiet, a follower of the anonymous Master of the Boqueteaux, as the necessary precondition of this study. This instance, the author declares, offers art of premodern image makers before the age of art. It posits the work of art as document, as trace, rather than as monument.
One overly intrusive touch is the author's ongoing, fictional, empathetic account of his protagonist's thoughts on the...
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