“Influence.” Studies in Iconography 33 (2012): 197-206

© 2012 by the Board of Trustees of Western Michigan University

Influence

Kirk Ambrose

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first use of “influence” in English as a noun ca. 1374 and only much later as a verb, in 1658 (OED, s.v. “influence,” n. 2.a; v. 1.a).1 The word ultimately derives from the classical Latin verb influere, which references an inflowing either literal, as a river into a sea, or figurative, as riches into coffers. This meaning endured during the Middle Ages, but influere and its cognates took on an increasing propositional force, typically aiming to identify a cause.2 Around 330 CE Firmicus posited in his Mathesis that the movements of heavenly bodies influence events on Earth, the influentia stellae. Similar astrologi-cal usages circulated widely, including in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (III.569, line 618), but by the thirteenth century the term could likewise refer broadly to an insensible action exerted on another person or thing, as in the medieval Portuguese and Spanish influencia and the medieval Italian influenza. By the late Middle Ages, “influence” typically implied the existence of an agent—divine, astral, or other-wise—that shapes, guides, and even lends coherence to the seeming cacophony of things and experiences. This sense endures in modern English and, indeed, a similar operative assumption underlies many scientific and humanistic inquiries. Among medieval thinkers, Thomas Aquinas offered perhaps the most prob-ing remarks linking influence and causality. His Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle posits that “the term cause implies some influence on the being of the thing caused.”3 The “some influence” (influxus quemdam) here functions as some-thing akin to an operative conjecture, one that could be developed in myriad ways. Robert Pasnau and Christopher Shields describe Aquinas’s understanding of cau-sation, a cornerstone of his intellectual edifice, as “remarkably elastic.”4 In his ear-liest surviving work, De Principiis Naturae, Aquinas used the example of a bronze statue as part of his illustration of the four categories of causality. Accordingly, the material cause is the bronze; the efficient cause can be identified as the artist, as well as the specific notions of artistry guiding facture; the formal cause can loosely be described as the shape of the work or, more properly, its essence; and the final cause comprises the various functions that the statue serves. The notion of causal-ity in Aquinas warrants much more discussion than is here possible; however, it bears stressing for present purposes that although artists may be the most obvious

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and proximate cause of a given artwork, Aquinas’s interpretive system embraces a host of remote causes—including materiality and the functions that a work of art serves—as likewise exerting influence. Among medievalists, as well as historians of the arts of other periods, “influ-ence” has been widely used for roughly two centuries. The term can be used to identify a source or precedent for a specific aspect of a work of art, such as Byz-antine influences on the technique of the Romanesque frescoes of Berzé-la-Ville.5 Medievalists, as well as humanists in a host of fields, likewise use the term in a more general sense of producing effects by rather insensible means.6 The 1829 Encyclopaedia Americana asserted that “Arabian architecture had some influence” on German building after the coronation of Charlemagne.7 On one hand, this usage lacks specificity concerning both the mechanisms of transmission and the architec-tural elements in question; on the other hand, there is an admirably tentative and conjectural quality in the term’s assertion, reminiscent of medieval usage. Taking the scholarship on Romanesque sculpture as a touchstone, I argue that the labile and expansive understanding of influence during the Middle Ages continues to offer an effective interpretive framework at the dawn of the twenty-first century, a time when scholars in the field continue to establish new trajectories for research.8 Within the notion of influence articulated by Aquinas, the artist is only one node within a broad network that might encompass myriad causes, from economic to geographic to social.9 Viewed from this perspective, the interpretive question with respect to the genesis of an artwork becomes less one of describing the particularities of proximate agency (of the artist, of the patron, or both) and more one of considering the constellation of causes, however remote, that coalesce within and inform a work of art. I consider the merits of “influence” fully aware that the term’s very diffuse-ness has been criticized from many theoretical perspectives, including Marxist and feminist. Harold Bloom’s celebrated and strident embrace of the term—which he understood as something a poet struggles to overcome as he forges his own voice—can be read in part as symptomatic of widespread misgivings.10 Begin-ning in the 1960s many (rightly) began to champion, often by emphasizing the novelty of individual artist’s contributions, female and other artists who had been marginalized in traditional art histories.11 Within studies that explicated the agency of artists, the purchase of influence—which often signals a heavy, even unwitting, debt to the past—waned. This was likewise true in many studies of canonical art-ists. David Summers, for one, embraced the notion of artistic intention and agency for the study of Renaissance masters, ostensibly a challenge to the pronounce-ment of the “death of the author” by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and oth-ers.12 Michael Baxandall brilliantly voiced dissatisfaction in an “excursus against influence,” part of his Patterns of Intention.13 For Baxandall, influence is “shifty”

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because it pretends to explain a cause, while in actuality it only identifies a source. He argued that art historians would profit more by devoting attention to the agency of artists, especially the brief, or troc, that an individual tackles in her oeuvre. How an artist positions herself in relationship to tradition is crucial for Baxandall: she might, among other ways, assimilate, appropriate, develop, parody, reconstitute, or simplify the art of the past. Such metaphors of cultural production endure as mainstays of art historical discourse. In Patterns of Intention Alex Potts identified the fault lines of a disciplin-ary shift in the 1980s, away from a historical account of pictures and toward more stridently theoretical analyses. Baxandall offered some of the most self-reflective passages ever written on precisely what it is that art historians do with their words, but his gestures toward historical context appeared somewhat imprecise and rather narrowly construed. Baxandall’s Picasso and Piero della Francesco, Potts pointed out, both appear “caught up in distinctively twentieth-century problems of pictur-ing, the squaring up of suggested depth with the flatness of the picture plane.”14 In the tradition of Pliny and Vasari, the significance of a given work rested primarily in the technical and formal innovations of individual masters. Such an interpretive model does not adequately account for a wide range of other art-making practices, including those in which adherence to traditions was especially valued and those projects involving multiple, anonymous artists. For many periods, including much of the Middle Ages, scant information survives about individual agents, whether artist or patron, involved in art making. Of the many thousands of extant Romanesque monumental sculptures from across Europe, inscribed names of artists feature on only a handful, for example, Gildu-inus at Toulouse and Willegelmo at Modena. Typically we know little to nothing more about these figures, certainly not enough to make firm claims about the tra-jectory of their careers. Linda Seidel even doubts that the “Gislebertus” inscribed below the feet of Christ in the Last Judgment tympanum of St-Lazare, Autun, is the sculptor’s signature, preferring to see the name as referencing a nobleman who featured prominently in the region’s history.15 Carl Sheppard long ago cau-tioned against the pitfalls involved in approaching Romanesque sculpture in terms of individual makers.16 Citing the methodological writings of Giovanni Morelli and Bernard Berenson, Sheppard contended that to speak meaningfully of artists one must have many more surviving monuments than those which survive from the twelfth century and know much more about an individual’s artistic chronol-ogy than is possible for a period with such scant documentation.17 For this reason, any claims regarding a sculptor’s career risk mapping preconceived notions onto the past of how individual makers mature artistically. Sheppard suggested that construing the field in terms of ateliers rather than individual agents offers a more profitable avenue of research.

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Some fifty years after Sheppard’s publication it remains the case that pre-cious little is known about the organization or working methods of Romanesque ateliers. This situation is not from a lack of scholarly attention but rather is largely a factor of the dearth of evidence, including the absence of contracts that would afford insights into artistic production as well as patronage systems. Scholars have typically envisioned rather well-organized groups of sculptors, guided by a master and moving from commission to commission, honing their skills along the way.18 Such models tend to be extrapolated backward from the much better documented workshops of the Gothic period. It is entirely possible, however, that alternative practices existed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Robert Maxwell, for one, has recently questioned the utility of the atelier model for study of the Roman-esque sculpture of Aquitaine, arguing that individual sculptors worked autono-mously, moving from site to site in a rather haphazard fashion.19 He suggests that we more productively think in terms of worksites, or chantiers, that attracted skilled masons, whose individual contributions were not necessarily coordinated by a single master. Similar artistic practices may not have been followed across all of western Europe, but Maxwell’s studies enjoin caution for how we envision the coordination of large-scale artistic projects in the twelfth century. Given the uncertainties surrounding even basic aspects of the agents of Romanesque sculptural production, it is unclear precisely what terms such as “appropriation” and its kin fully mean, for such metaphors tend to rely upon the existence of a single, scheming author whose intentions are reasonably coherent and can be identified with confidence. Georges Bataille—who trained and pub-lished as a medievalist20—developed a notion of heterology that is here instructive: “the process of appropriation is . . . characterized by a homogeneity (static equi-librium) of the author of the appropriation, and of objects as final result, whereas excretion presents itself as the result of heterogeneity and can move in the direc-tion of an ever greater heterogeneity, liberating impulses whose ambivalence is more and more pronounced.”21 According to Bataille, cultural products associated with the sacred, including artistic monuments and spectacles, are unproductive in the sense that they are unnecessary for the preservation of life and comprise an element that is fundamentally irrational and heterogeneous. Accordingly, the significance of religious works can never be described fully in terms of the plan or intentions of a designer. In this light it should be emphasized that the many attempts to identify iconographic programs within ensembles of Romanesque sculptures have proven largely unsatisfactory.22 This scholarly impasse, I submit, stems largely from the operative assumption that a primary motivation for commissioning and produc-ing a group of sculptures was to articulate the unified idea of a designer. By con-trast, Bataille’s notion of heterology encourages us to consider the polyphonic and

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heterogeneous nature of artistic projects such as cloisters or cathedrals, in which relatively large groups of individuals participated over relatively long periods of time. To be sure, there have already been significant efforts toward understanding the complex needs that Romanesque monuments incorporate, including, among others, considerations of how liturgical performances activated sculptures,23 of psychological responses to representations of human bodies,24 and of play.25 The celebrated central tympanum in the narthex of Vézelay (Fig. 1) is a case in point. This complex work features a host of figures, including Christ surrounded by the Apostles at center, and, in the surrounding compartments and archivolts, the marvels of the East, the signs of the zodiac, the labors of the month, acrobats,

Fig. 1. Pentecost with additional scenes and figures. Tympanum; Church of La Madeleine, Vézelay. (Photo: Colum Hourihane.)

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a dog licking himself, and a siren. The sculptures of this portal have been seen to elucidate Church doctrine,26 complement liturgical processions,27 assert the abbey’s juridical privileges,28 manifest the plenitude of God’s creation,29 and assert monastic solidarity.30 Rather than parse these interpretations and weigh their var-ious merits, I am interested in recognizing within this “polyphony” of modern interpretations evidence for the remarkable ability of Romanesque sculpture to serve multiple functions. This characteristic was likely influenced by the typically additive working methods of twelfth-century artists. With respect to the Vézelay portal, Francis Salet provided compelling archaeological evidence that its design changed midway through construction, which included a heightening of the lintel, enabling the introduction of jamb figures and the trumeau figure of John the Bap-tist.31 An analogously additive aesthetic might likewise be identified in the portal’s many admixtures or juxtapositions of a wide array of figures. Varied as any collec-tion of heterogeneous subjects in any contemporary cloister, these sculptures resist reduction to a single voice or to any single idea or program. Various themes can be identified here, such as the central narrative of Pentecost, but the tympanum’s many admixtures accommodate a broad spectrum of influences, including politi-cal, social, and theological. Equipped with the insights offered by, among others, phenomenology and reception theory, over the past two decades art historians have tended to consider the social functions of art more in terms of viewer response and less in terms of influencing the appearance of a work of art. This perspective likely stems from the fact, alluded to above, that the notion of influence has often been understood as a search for sources within the discipline of art history. Yet we have seen that interpretation of the term could be much more expansive, such as in medieval usage. Aquinas, for one, believed that one might properly consider, for instance, how social conventions influenced a work of art. Although the monk distinguishes between intended (per se) and unintended (per accidens) influences,32 the dearth of information on eleventh- and twelfth-century artistic practices would likely make the attempt to discern such distinctions an often fruitless pursuit. Yet as the field of Romanesque sculpture studies continues to expand its methodological purview, the typically expansive medieval understandings of “influence” could potentially provide a vehicle for thinking in innovative terms about artistic production. Rather than impose an interpretive framework in procrustean fashion, an expansive notion of influence might encourage the historian to pursue novel research trajectories. Indirect confirmation of the profitability of adopting an expanded notion of influence might be identified in the fact that this term appears in some of the more methodologically trailblazing scholarship to appear in recent years. Two examples suffice: neuro–art history and the so-called “minor” art history. Following on the heels of a host of discoveries in cognitive studies, genetics, and other fields, there

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has been a biological turn in the humanities. The view that artists are complete masters and mistresses of their work has come to seem somewhat naive to many scholars. With respect to literature, H. Porter Abbot, Jonathan Gottschall, Eric White, Elaine Scarry, and Lisa Zunshine, among others, have examined how nar-rative structures and even the very existence of literature itself, which relies upon a reader’s empathy with fictional characters, respond to the ways in which the brain is hardwired. Within art history, David Freedberg, John Onians, Barbara Stafford, and others have argued that the neural structures of our brains play a constitutive role in the fashioning of images.33 Opinions vary as to the degree to which this is the case. Onians tends to imagine neurology heavily impinging upon artistic production, whereas Stafford tends to see a more dynamic exchange between biol-ogy and culture. Despite their differences, both recognize that artists are not fully conscious of or in control of the decisions that they make, for there are biological influences that cannot be transcended. It must be stressed that the conclusions of neuro–art history remain highly speculative, as the precise physiology of cognition remain to be fully articulated by scientists. Branden Joseph’s recent book on the relatively unknown artist Tony Conrad embraces Gilles Deleuze and Félix Gautari’s notion of “minor history.”34 Joseph imagines a process of “deterritorialization” of major fields, such as modern art his-tory, that ultimately extends and calls into question their operative assumptions. One of his chief claims is that individual artists and thinkers are subsumed by broader cultural trajectories that span disciplinary boundaries. Within such a his-tory it makes little sense to speak of the development of autonomous sequences and series,35 for many factors influence the production of any cultural form. For example, the music theory of John Cage can inspire Michel Foucault to question the status of the author of a novel; the camp films of Jack Smith can inflect and illuminate the facture of minimalist sculpture; and so on. By displacing the role of individuals—indeed, the ostensible subject of the book, Tony Conrad, receives relatively scant attention—Joseph traces influences across disciplinary boundaries, offering a more comprehensive account of cross-fertilizations than, say, the rather nebulous notion of Zeitgeist. Rather than offer a conclusive account of the culture of 1960s and ‘70s New York, Joseph’s greatest contribution lies in his providing a flexible interpretive model that might be profitably extended to other fields of inquiry. Whether or not one embraces the conclusions of neuro- or “minor” art his-tory, both subfields demonstrate ambitious attempts to expand the methodologi-cal toolbox available to the discipline. That both lines of inquiry make a point of downplaying the role of individual artists in the facture of works of art might strike medievalists, who have long developed ways of talking about anonymous works of art, as somewhat unremarkable. Yet such a reaction potentially overlooks what

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medievalists might contribute to broader methodological discussions within our discipline. The flexibility of the medieval usage of “influence” might offer one vehicle to articulate the terms of that contribution. In other words, “influence” offers not a historically apposite term for the study of medieval art but has the potential to inform the discipline of art history, broadly contrued.

NOTES

1. In a book review (of Venice’s Mediterranean Colonies: Architecture and Urbanism, by Maria Georgopoulou, Art Bulletin 85 [2003]: 189–92, at 189), Oleg Grabar suggested that “influence” is perhaps best used as a verb. 2. See, for example, Ronald Edward Latham et al., Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, vol. 5 (London: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1359–60. See also Michelle P. Brown, “An Early Outbreak of ‘Influenza’? Aspects of Influence, Medieval and Modern,” in Under the Influence: The Concept of Influence and the Study of Illuminated Manuscripts, ed. John Lowden and Alixe Bovey (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 1–10. 3. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, trans. John P. Rowan (Chi-cago: Regnery, 1961), 1:300; Thomas Aquinas, In metaphysicam Aristotelis commentaria, ed. M.-R. Cathala (Turin: Marietti, 1926), 251: “hoc vero nomen Causa, importat influxum quemdam ad esse causati” (V.1.751). A similar usage is found elsewhere in Aquinas’s writings, including: “Ad cuius evidentiam sciendum est, quod secundaria causa non potest influere in suum effectum nisi in quan-tum recipit virtutem primae causae. Sicut autem influere causae efficientis est agere, ita influere cau-sae finalis est appeti et desiderari,” in Thomas Aquinas, Questiones disputatae de veritate q. 22, a. 2c. For Aquinas’s Latin texts, I consulted the authoritative versions available at “Corpus Thomisticum,” Fundación Tomás de Aquino, http://www.corpusthomisticum.org. 4. Robert Pasnau and Christopher Shields, The Philosophy of Aquinas (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004), 21–48. See also Michael Rota, “Causation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas, ed. Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 5. See the historiographic overview in Juliette Rollier-Hanselmann, “D’Auxerre à Cluny: Tech-nique de la peinture murale entre le VIIIe et le XIIe siècle en Bourgogne,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 40 (1997): 57–90. 6. Lawrence Nees, “Godescalc’s Career and the Problem of ‘Influence,’” in Lowden and Bovey, Under the Influence, 21–44. 7. Francis Lieber and Edward Wigglesworth, eds., Encyclopaedia Americana: A Popular Dic-tionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature, History, Politics and Biography, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1829), 347. 8. Robert Maxwell and Kirk Ambrose, eds., Current Directions in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Sculpture Studies (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). 9. For such an interpretive model, see Pierre Bourdieu’s discussions of “habitus” and “field” words in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). Nevertheless, Bourdieu tends to approach art in terms of known agents, such as his study of Flaubert: The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure in the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 10. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Bloom’s model has been profitably adopted by a few art historians, including Norman Bryson, Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and William Diebold, “The Anxiety of Influence in Early Medieval Art: The Codex aureus of Charles the Bald in Ottonian Regensburg,” in Lowden and Bovey, Under the Influence, 51–64.

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11. See the masterful overview of this period in Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews, “The Feminist Critique of Art History,” Art Bulletin 69 (1987): 326–57. 12. David Summers, “Intentions in the History of Art,” New Literary History 17 (1986): 305–21. 13. Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). See also Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). 14. Alex Potts, “Michael Baxandall and the Shadows in Plato’s Cave,” in About Michael Baxan-dall, ed. Adrian Rifkin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 69–83, at 73. Many of the studies in Lowden and Bovey, Under the Influence, take Baxandall as a starting point. 15. Linda Seidel, Legends in Limestone: Lazarus, Gislebertus, and the Cathedral of Autun (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 16. Carl D. Sheppard, “Romanesque Sculpture in Tuscany: A Problem of Methodology,” Gazette des Beaux Arts, 6th ser., 54 (September 1959): 97–108. 17. Peter Lasko argues that Roger of Helmarshausen is unique among Romanesque artists in the relatively large number of monuments and documents attributable to him, which perhaps allows us to trace his career; see Lasko, “Roger of Helmarshausen, Author and Craftsman: Life, Soures of Style, and Iconography,” in Objects, Images, and the Word: Art in the Service of the Liturgy, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, NJ: Index of Christian Art, Dept. of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University in association with Princeton University Press, 2003), 180–201. 18. See, for example, C. Edson Armi, Masons and Sculptors in Romanesque Burgundy: The New Aesthetic of Cluny III, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983). 19. Robert Maxwell, The Art of Medieval Urbanism: Parthenay in Romanesque Aquitaine (Uni-versity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007); Robert Maxwell, “Romanesque Construc-tion and the Urban Context: Parthenay-le-Vieux in Aquitaine,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 66 (2007): 24–59. 20. Bruce Holsinger, for one, describes Bataille as a Para-Thomist; see Holsinger, The Pre-modern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 26–56. 21. George Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–39, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 95. For the development of Bataille’s thinking on heterogeneity, see Joseph Libertson, “Bataille and Communication: From Heterogeneity to Continuity,” Modern Language Notes 89, no. 4 (1974): 669–98. 22. See, for example, Ilene Forsyth, “The Monumental Arts of the Romanesque Period: Recent Research; The Romanesque Cloister,” in The Cloisters: Studies in Honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary, ed. Elizabeth C. Parker with Mary B. Shepard (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), 3–25. 23. Recently, Margot Fassler, The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 24. Thomas E. A. Dale, “The Nude at Moissac: Vision, Phantasia, and the Experience of Romanesque Sculpture,” in Maxwell and Ambrose, Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Sculpture Stud-ies, 61–76. 25. Ilene Forsyth, “The Theme of Cockfighting in Burgundian Romanesque Sculpture,” Specu-lum 53 (1978): 252–82. 26. Peter Low, “‘You Who Once Were Far Off’: Enlivening Scripture in the Main Portal at Vézelay,” Art Bulletin 85 (2003): 469–89; Eric Palazzo, “L’iconographie des portails de Vézelay: Nouvelles données d’interprétation,” L’écrit-voir 4 (1984): 22–32. 27. Peter Diemer, “Das Pfingstportal von Vézelay—Wege, Umwege und Abwege, einer Diskus-sion,” Jahrbuch des Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte 1 (1985): 77–114. 28. Kristin Sazama, “The Assertion of Monastic Spiritual and Temporal Authority in the Roman-esque Sculpture of Sainte-Madeleine at Vézelay,” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1995).

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29. Adolf Katzenellenbogen, “The Central Tympanum at Vézelay: Its Encyclopedic Meaning and Its Relation to the First Crusade,” Art Bulletin 26 (1944): 141–51. 30. Michael D. Taylor, “The Pentecost at Vézelay,” Gesta 19 (1980): 9–15. 31. Francis Salet, “La Madeleine de Vézelay: Notes sur la façade de la nef,” Bulletin monumen-tal 99 (1940): 223–37. 32. See, for example, Aquinas’s Super librum De causis expositio, I, http://www.corpusthomis-ticum.org/cdc01.html. This commentary, one of Aquinas’s last works, repeatedly uses influere and its cognates. 33. David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experi-ence,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 5 (2007): 197–203; John Onians, Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Barbara Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 34. Branden W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (A Minor History) (New York: Zone Books, 2008). 35. See, for example, George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962).