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

Though different, these inputs exist in mental spaces that are interconnected and share a frame (Fig. 19). I am grateful to Mark Sheingorn for conceiving this example and preparing the diagram. A simple analogy may be helpful: In this diagram, each of the lines, the blue vertical one and the red horizontal one, exists in a separate space. Within the frame of the plane, these are “extraordinarily different inputs.” Then we attach a red horizontal line to each blue point on the vertical line. This is what Fauconnier and Turner call cross-space mapping. The result is a rectangle that has a property found in neither of the lines: it is two-dimensional. Once the new reality is created, it can be explored, an activity Fauconnier and Turner call “running the blend.” In the diagram, that means exploiting the ability to move in any direction, whereas the input spaces allowed movement only in a straight line.

In our example, one input space is Mary’s painless birth experience and the other input space is the female book owner’s birth experience. In spite of the state of pregnancy they share—the frame—Mary’s experience should not have been possible for the book-owner. According to Christian belief, as punishment for succumbing to the devil’s temptation, God inflicted pain in childbirth on Eve and all women after her. Mary escaped because she was without sin. Thus, the two spaces of the pregnant reader-viewer and Mary are fundamentally different, separated by the gulf of the Fall. A cross-space mapping links these two spaces. However, “composition of elements from the inputs”—that is, the bringing together of these two sets of features—“makes relations available in the blend that do not exist in the separate inputs.” Fauconnier and Turner, 42. Further, “Once the blend is established, we can 'run the blend'—that is, operate cognitively within it, developing new structure and manipulating the various events as an integrated unit.” Fauconnier and Turner, 60. What activates the blend? I suggest it is the material object, the book itself. As its owner moves toward her birthing room, clutching her book makes Mary present to her. Perhaps she remembers the miniature of Mary healing the sick (Fig. 8; fol. 27r) or even imagines herself receiving the blessing that Mary gives in the miniature of her arrival in Bethlehem where Jesus will be born (Fig. 20; fol. 66r).

This gesture is not described in the text, and in the miniature it takes place just as Mary is crossing a threshold, facilitating the pregnant woman’s identification with Mary. In the blend, the participant can make “connections across spaces [that] seem to pop out automatically, yielding a flash of comprehension . . . .” Fauconnier and Turner, 44. By experiencing rather than merely observing, the reader-viewer comprehends in a different and deeper way that she shares embodiment with Mary and can confidently expect a quick labor, an easy recovery and, above all, a healthy child.

A fuller study would include Curschmann’s important use of cultural and historical perspectives to situate the magical, protective function of the Cracow manuscript within a tradition of folk medicine tolerated in pastoral practice. Systematic application of the methods of analysis that the discipline of art history has developed and extended reference to the detailed studies of this manuscript by major scholars, some of which I have cited, would yield more insight into its miniatures. Further, continuing this study to include the unusual emphasis in the manuscript on the Massacre of the Innocents, a threat to the life of the child Jesus that he escaped due to parental vigilance (as well as divine intervention), would strengthen its argument. My goal has been to demonstrate the potential of cognitive studies, which does not replace but rather enhances the approaches and tools employed by art historians. I aim to have shown that, starting from shared embodiment and using tools such as evocriticism, the enactive view, the empathetic potential of mirror neurons, Theory of Mind, and conceptual blending, cognitive studies can substantially enhance our access to and our experience of art objects, even those from the distant past.