Images in Action: The Theatricality of Franco-Flemish Art in the Late Middle Ages

FAIN: FA-55478-10

Laura Johanna Weigert
Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8559)

The orchestration of dramatic spectacles in French and Flemish churches, courts, and city streets during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries led to an increasing demand for large-scale portable pictures. In turn, a new subject matter developed, in which the themes depicted in panel painting, painted cloths, and tapestries overlapped with those enacted by live actors. Focusing on specific examples, I make the following two-part argument: first, large-scale pictures played a vital role in liturgical and secular drama and second, they achieved their significance and efficacy through a dynamic exchange with contemporary dramatic performances. My study provides an alternate history of this period of artistic production, by stressing the theatrical rather than the devotional function of artworks. It also confirms that drama provides the key for understanding not only the specific way in which texts and images operated in medieval society but the defining features of late medieval culture.

Associated Products

French Visual Culture and the Making of Medieval Theater (Book)
Title: French Visual Culture and the Making of Medieval Theater
Author: Laura Weigert
Abstract: This book revives what was unique, strange, and exciting about the variety of performances that took place in the realms of the French kings and Burgundian dukes. Laura Weigert brings together a wealth of visual artifacts and practices to explore this tradition of late medieval performance located not in “theaters” but in churches, courts, and city streets and squares. By stressing the theatricality rather than the realism of fifteenth-century visual culture and the spectacular rather than the devotional nature of its effects, she offers a new way of thinking about late medieval representation and spectatorship. She shows how images that ostensibly document medieval performance instead revise its characteristic features to conform to a play-going experience that was associated with classical antiquity. This retrospective vision of the late medieval performance tradition contributed to its demise in sixteenth-century France and promoted assumptions about medieval theater that continue to inform the contemporary disciplines of art and theater history.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/european-history-1000-1450/french-visual-culture-and-making-medieval-theater?format=HB
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781107040472
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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