0.8 Making the cognitive turn in art history: a case study  (Page 13/17)

Messerer’s analogy to polyphonic music can be further developed as a way to think about the visual narrative in this manuscript by considering the implications of the fact that none of the banderole texts are quotations from Wernher’s poem; rather, they seem to have been composed expressly for this manuscript. As elements of a parallel narrative, the speech banderoles of course need not quote directly from the text any more than the miniature must—or even can—literally visualize every element of the text. The two narratives, the text and the miniatures with banderoles, do not simply repeat one another; they create differences with strikingly important effects. In their form, the banderoles visualize emotions as well as the directional flow of words; they strongly evoke present time. The accompanying text often uses the past tense and indirect quotation to create narrated time. I suggest that in combination, text and miniature create a sense of authenticity, of the inevitable differences between direct and reported speech, eyewitness and carefully constructed written account. The account compiled after reflection is not incorrect; what it lacks in immediacy and, perhaps, precision, it gains in detail and overall structure. The result for the reader-viewer can be a sense of multiple possibilities for authenticity, acceptance of the possibility of responding somewhat differently to each interaction with the manuscript depending on the relative weight placed on visual and verbal narratives. In other words, imagining something somewhat differently each time does not mean that any one reconstruction is wrong. The makers of this manuscript successfully designed it to capture and recapture the attention of its owners. For Boyd, “ Attention capture can explain the design features of stories, as other explanations cannot” (392). He speaks of “choices that successful stories continually make about genre, character, plot, medium, structure, character contrast, irony, and much else” that “can be explained in terms of attention, in terms of offering enticements—especially emotional enticements—to keep audiences distracted from responding to their immediate surrounds as they half-immerst themselves in the far-fetched world of story” (393). I extend that argument here to the design features of the manuscript and specifically to the decision to accompany the verbal narrative with a visual narrative that incorporates speech. Part of its attraction is that it fosters repeated and imaginative meditation on the events of Christianity’s central narrative, an affective devotional practice that was beginning to spread among the laity. For a recent and important study of this phenomenon, see Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

Selection of events for illustration, and therefore special emphasis, direct the reader-viewer’s attention towards specific subjects. As I suggested earlier, one of these is marriage. As we have seen, in one miniature the priest makes the marriage of Anne and Joachim by controlling the puppet-like Anne with his body and Joachim with his banderole. His words perform their union: “Receive this woman for your own, so that you will both be one body forever.” But in the marriage of Mary and Joseph (Fig. 13; fol. 37v), the bishop’s gesture is much more tentative, and the visible space between his body and Mary’s affords her some autonomy. Further, his banderole quite literally stops short of the couple rather than encircling them, and his words, “Joseph, receive the maiden, for it pleases God and all the people well” [Joseph enpfahe die maget. / wan ez got und allen liuten wol behaget], do not effect a union. Joseph’s grasp of Mary’s wrist indicates the transfer of Mary’s person into his care and control, but she is less passive than Anne and appears to extend her arm herself. Further, she has allowed Joseph to touch her. Her equal height with Joseph communicates equality rather than gendered hierarchy. Separated from the community, Joseph and Mary form a new unit, or rather a unit of a new type. Wernher and the artist have attributed to each partner a strong reluctance to participate, resistance that has been overcome only through demonstration to “fleshly eyes” that this marriage accords with God’s will. All of this has been communicated through the medium of the body.