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Limewood, Chiromancy and Narratives of Making. Writing about the materials and processes of sculpture
Author(s) -
Baker Malcolm
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8365.00127
Subject(s) - sculpture , narrative , section (typography) , visual arts , art , reading (process) , character (mathematics) , craft , subject (documents) , aesthetics , literature , computer science , linguistics , philosophy , geometry , mathematics , library science , operating system
Since its publication in 1980 Michael Baxandall’s The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany has attracted the attention of art‐historians through its re‐thinking of approaches to Northern art, as well as both a case study in the use of descriptive terms about art and as a model for a cultural history of art. This essay deals with a far less widely appreciated feature of the book: its innovatory mode of writing about the materials and processes of sculpture. The first section is concerned with the responses to Limewood Sculptors and argues that the concern with sculptural technique that runs throughout the book deserves more attention. The second section examines various more familiar conventions for writing about sculptural process, ranging from materials‐based descriptive accounts to archivally‐grounded narratives of the commissioning and making of specific works. The third section considers Baxandall’s adoption of Paracelsus’ notion of chiromancy –‘the art of reading the inner character of a person or thing from its external character’– for an understanding of limewood sculpture. This interpretive strategy opens up the possibility of questions of material and process being treated not as a discrete subject but instead being allowed to inform and inflect the discussion of many other issues throughout the book. In particular, an awareness of materials and making is seen as important for our understanding of a sculpture's reception and viewing. In the final section the implications of Baxandall’s writing about sculptural process for other periods and cultures are explored through a discussion of eighteenth‐century sculptural practice and the extent to which materials and process were registered by contemporary viewers. Taking as a case study the ways in which the drawings and models for Roubiliac’s Argyll monument might be interpreted, the essay argues that Baxandall’s writing about sculpture and its making has a methodological resonance far beyond the field of South German Renaissance sculpture.