Those unfamiliar with earlier publications by Jérôme Baschet, a member of the Groupe d’Anthropologie Historique de l’Occident Médiéval at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, might well approach this modest little paperback in expectation of a useful but uninspiring handbook devoted to the matching of written text and visual image. Defined by Erwin Panofsky as preliminary to the true interpretation of meaning, iconography has too often been conceived in practice as a matter of identification and description; more recently, it has slipped out of favor with the advent of interpretive models that liberate the image from passive dependence on the written word. Despite much excellent and highly innovative scholarship on the art of the Western Middle Ages, the dominance of studies devoted to a specific theme or an individual monument has made it difficult to identify more broadly applicable interpretive strategies. Baschet’s ambitious work attempts to bridge these divides by offering a synthesis of theory and practice, in essence proposing a renewed and revitalized iconography that is exemplified by detailed and sensitive readings of individual works of art.

The book is a model of organizational clarity. Baschet begins with an introductory essay in which he elaborates the concept of the “image-objet,” with the dual goals of embedding visual form in the realm of social practice and of demonstrating how the image itself functions as an active generator of meaning. The main text is divided into three parts, each consisting of three chapters; the first of the three chapters is devoted to theory and method, while the next two offer detailed studies of a specific theme or monument that are designed to exemplify and clarify the preceding interpretive framework. This distinction is not as rigid as it might appear, however, because the chapters on method are full of references to specific works of art; the discussion of each work is kept to a minimum, but the informative endnotes provide elaboration and suggestions for additional reading. As a means of further mitigating this potentially rigid tripartite structure, the reader is invited to navigate the text using a non-linear strategy, beginning with any one of the case studies and only then proceeding to the essays on method. The chapters can, in fact, be read in a variety of sequences, and this has the effect of collapsing the traditional tension between theory and application, as well as making the reader an active and engaged participant rather than the passive recipient of the author’s argument.

In much the same way, Baschet is concerned throughout with confronting stereotypes and assumptions. While some, such as the durable cliché of medieval art as the “Bible of the illiterate,” may seem easy prey, it is refreshing to encounter at almost every turn a challenge to the dichotomies and oppositions conventionally found in discussions of medieval art: clerical vs. lay, elite vs. popular, text vs. image, high vs. low art, center vs. periphery, body vs. spirit, form vs. meaning, the iconographic vs. the ornamental. As a supplement and corrective, Baschet advocates exploring the articulation and integration of the varied interrelationships among these concepts, allowing for multiplicity and complexity rather than simple dichotomies. It is not a matter of inverting traditional hierarchies to favor one side over the other, but rather of mitigating the ideas of hierarchy and dichotomy as governing concepts for the interpretation of medieval art. At the same time, Baschet is passionate about the vitality, inventiveness, and immediacy of medieval images. His discussion of method and theory is informed by an appreciation for the uniqueness of each painting or piece of sculpture and a sense of how it works visually; he retains the attentiveness and enthusiasm of the connoisseur, deepened and enriched by the anthropologist’s understanding of the visual image as a culturally embedded object.

Baschet’s focus is on the central Middle Ages, the eleventh and particularly the twelfth centuries, or what might conventionally be called Romanesque art, although his examples extend into the fifteenth century. His essays span a range of media, from monumental painting cycles to sculpted portals to manuscript illumination. Part 1 discusses the medieval church as a site of ritual, enlarging the notion of the image-objet to encompass the image-lieu (or the lieu d’images). Rather than cite specific examples of equivalence between liturgical practice, architectural space, and decoration, Baschet begins from a broader perspective, outlining the role of Ecclesia not simply as a material structure or an institution but as an overarching concept that locates social experience within a larger spiritual order. Thus the structuring of a church portal or the subdivision of space within the church embody the social and spiritual hierarchies of medieval experience, as well as their ultimate unity within a larger community of the faithful. Armed with a precise understanding of the social and spiritual roles of the medieval church, the reader is prepared to enter specific buildings and understand their decoration as more than the mere reflection of words or rituals. For example, the paintings on the vault at Saint-Savin acquire deeper resonance when studied as an entirety that must be experienced three-dimensionally, within the space of the church, rather than atomized in iconographic studies devoted to individual themes. Viewed from below, the ornamental bands form the embracing arms of a giant cross, inscribing Old Testament narratives within a larger spiritual framework that reveals their true import, much as the relocation of individual scenes close to the sanctuary stresses their typological significance at the expense of narrative sequence. At San Giminiano, the scenes of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem and the Annunciation to the Virgin, both centered on a door or gateway and placed together close to the church entrance, are seen in relation to each other and to the larger notion of the portal as passageway between the secular and the spiritual.

In part 2, Baschet moves from monumental wall painting to portal sculpture, narrowing his focus to twelfth-century France while at the same time tightening his critique of traditional iconography. He condemns the separation of form and meaning and the privileging of verbal language as the primary source of meaning. Rather than arguing for an autonomy of the visual, Baschet sees the figural and the verbal as two distinct yet interrelated forms of language that must be played off one against the other. Both are seen as historically contingent and embedded within a common framework of social structures and experiences. He proposes what he calls a “relational iconography” (l’iconographie relationelle). Proceeding from a close internal reading of the work’s structure, he then brings to bear multiple juxtapositions and associations: between one part of a work and the whole, between one work and other works, between the work and its site, between the work and the larger social environment. Thus meaning is generated by, but not limited to, formal considerations. This is visual analysis of a very particular type, distinct from the detailed consideration of elements such as drapery folds normally used as a tool for attributing works to an artist or workshop. Baschet is concerned instead with broader underlying structural elements, like the prevalence (or absence) of a strong central axis or the consistent pairing of opposites, which can be mapped against Biblical themes and contemporary social experience. Thus the story of Abraham and Isaac on the trumeau at Souillac is read as part of a broader dialogue on themes of authority, conflict, and subversion within the larger hierarchies of age, rank, and status in medieval culture as a whole. In selecting the sculpture at Souillac, well known by virtue of the classic article by Meyer Schapiro and more recently revisited by Michael Camille, Baschet clearly situates his approach in relation to these distinguished predecessors (Meyer Schapiro, “The Sculptures of Souillac,” in Selected Papers: Romanesque Art, New York: George Braziller, 1977: 102–130; “Mouths and Meanings: Towards an Anti-Iconography of Medieval Art,” in Michael Camille, Iconography at the Crossroads, Brendan Cassidy, ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993: 43–58). By contrast, in the chapter on the little-known portal at Bourg-Argental, Baschet works from a clean slate but uses a similar approach, building on an attentive structural analysis to show how the images establish a discourse based on interlocking themes of charity.

In part 3, Baschet moves from the detailed study of individual monuments to an examination of multiple images devoted to common themes or motifs. He introduces the concept of seriality to encourage the accumulation of the broadest possible range of images, thus permitting an emphasis on variation and invention rather than similarity and consistency. Such a broadly construed series of images facilitates a relational approach, exploring visual and thematic interconnections among series of images with different textual sources. The result is a hypertheme, a grouping of interrelated themes and images. As an example Baschet cites his own work on the Bosom of Abraham, an image that can be extended to form part of a hypertheme encompassing the Virgin and Child, the Mother of Mercy, and Divine Paternity. The result is a complex network centered on themes of parentage and kinship, themes that are at once biological, social, and spiritual. The final chapters examine two instances of seriality: the theme of musica humana as seen in three manuscript images, and a larger series of images devoted to the creation of Eve. The range, density, and richness of this material are impressive, even if the argument, particularly in the case of the Bosom of Abraham, is necessarily compressed.

This is a work of synthesis. Its importance lies not only in the detailed interpretations of individual works but in the way it makes concrete and accessible a range of recent French publications on medieval art and image theory. Baschet revisits his own previous work to provide material for many of the chapters, updating and amending as appropriate; the chapter on the sculptures of Souillac is slated to appear in English in a forthcoming volume edited by Robert Maxwell and Kirk Ambrose, something that will have the highly desirable effect of making Baschet’s work accessible to a larger U.S. audience. The author also draws extensively on existing scholarship, predominantly French, but also German and American, ranging from Émile Mâle, Aby Warburg, and Panofsky to Jean-Claude Bonne, Jean-Claude Schmitt, Jean Wirth, Hubert Damisch, and Georges Didi-Huberman; he also cites Schapiro, Camille, Ilene Forsyth, Madeline Caviness, and Herbert Kessler, among many others (surprisingly, the work of Linda Seidel is omitted). Yet despite the elegance and clarity of the more theoretical chapters, what emerges most strongly is Baschet’s fascination with the inventiveness, density, and power of medieval art. Baschet’s work ultimately centers on the visual image, not the artist, the patron, the theologian, or the audience, although any or all of these can be referenced as appropriate; issues of dating, condition, chronology, and attribution are mentioned only as necessary. Baschet’s essays are conceived as an act of homage to an art that he sees as endlessly creative, richly allusive, and actively engaged in a network of social relationships. His work proposes to revitalize not simply an easily discarded and outdated terminology but our very understanding of medieval objects themselves.