Lepers and Kings | Encounters

The Lepers and the Kings

The 12th Century French Abbey of St. Pierre, Moissac

Encounters

For many years, art historians have been helped in their task of telling the history of art by feeling secure in a definition of that art. No longer. No one, at least in the theoretical side of the discipline, is quite sure any art even happened before the time the history of art was invented, which would be some time in the 19th century. In the meantime, medieval art historians toil with their stones, knowing that the impulse to create constitutes art and that these stones are the manifestation. These laborers work at a disadvantage, however. For the most part, the stones have lost the ability to contend in the modern sphere: they have lost their color, or their context, or their heads, and in any case no longer carry with them the blunt force of awe they were meant to have. To look at them as art, to look at them with the background and training of an art historian, is to look at them through a glass darkly. There's no mistaking this: no system devised since the 19th century can come close to capturing the meaning of a portal such as that at Moissac. The futility of such a task has led some art historians in recent times to abandon such objects as this portal, declare the futility a victory, and take their theories, their contigencies and their high dudgeon to other venues they can in turn declare meaningless. The portal - its stone, its water, and its pigeons - remain in the southern sun, oblivious. The occasional visitor may be rewarded, however, for this is a place of extraordinary experience.

How human beings cope with extraordinary experience generally says more about their coping mechanisms than it does about the experience. Listening to art historical accounts of encounters with this portal is not unlike listening to reports of sightings of the Sasquatch. Studies of these sightings are interesting for the conflict that is always present between the believers and the scientists. The scientists, lacking the required proof of the existence of the Sasquatch within their own system - a carcass - and lacking a name to put to it - the thing is apparently neither human nor ape - declare the Sasquatch a mirage. At the same time the sighters, possessing adequate proof within their own system - shared experience in the form of previous accounts or stories - and possessing a name, continue, nevertheless, to sight it. Seekers for the spirit of the Middle Ages are, in many ways, like Sasquatch observers. They exhibit the same intense belief, unwavering loyalty, and compulsive behavior and they, too, lack proof. They are continually finding footprints and bits of fur and they return with the same blurry photographs. From these they happily draw elaborate and convincing conclusions while the Sasquatch itself withdraws into the shadowy forest.

This study of Moissac is, in some ways, no different. The stone is just as ruined, the context just as altered, the systems of beliefs just as disrupted as they are for any student of the place. What this study does, however, is to open up questions and possibilities by suggesting relationships and associations that cannot be proven and yet nevertheless have a life of their own. It suggests that the original force of the sculpture still remains and can be discovered. The monument escapes attempts at categorization and it is those escapes that are of methodological interest. Yet the art historian has to put aside previous assumptions in order to acknowledge, even in order to see, the possibilities inherent in this monument. This study builds upon and does not contradict previous studies; only by establishing a structure and categories can the escapes from the categories even appear. By opening a scholarly study on the web, it will experiment with ways of establishing a connection between the 20th century and the 12th.