0.8 Making the cognitive turn in art history: a case study  (Page 6/17)

Only after these full-page miniatures does the verbal narrator enter, as Wernher’s text begins. He opens with praise of Mary and an invocation of her assistance Wilhelm Messerer argues that the pair of full-page miniatures that open the visual program correspond to the opening of the text, in that both offer “timeless praise” of Mary; for him, this opening summarizes the entire meaning of the manuscript, which is to praise Mary. He interprets the two miniatures as a juxtaposition of good mother (Mary) and bad mother. Wilhelm Messerer, “Illustrationen zu Wernhers ‘Drei Liedern von der Magd,’” in Deutsche Literatur im Mittelalter. Kontakte und Perspektiven , edited by Christoph Cormeau (Stuttgart, 1979), 447-72, at 464-65. before moving on to a description of his source, which he believed Saint Jerome had written. Then he starts his narrative with the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, relating the episodes of Jacob’s ladder and his wrestling with an angel. This section of text ends with the line directly above the miniature of Jacob’s ladder on folio 6r (Fig. 3): “here you may hear a wonder” [hie muget ir wnder horen; l. 260]. The word “horen” seems to refer to his story of Mary’s life, which is about to begin. It stimulates the sense of hearing just at the moment when the miniature engages the sense of sight. The gazes of all three angels in the miniature are fixed in the upward direction of their movement on the diagonally placed ladder. This miniature also engages the “special perceptual skill” of seeing-out, as the ladder overlaps the frame and pushes all of the angels—especially the one at the top of the ladder—into the reader-viewer’s space. Thus both angelic gazes and seeing-out focus attention on the upper right corner of the page, as if urging that it be turned in order to read-view more of the story.

Boyd makes a case for storytelling as an adaptive quality in evolution. “ Adaptations are complex biological systems, physiological or behavioral, which through the cumulative Darwinian process of blind variation and selective retention have developed a design that reliably serves some function , in other words provides a sufficient solution to some problem a species faces to improve chances of survival and reproduction” (Boyd, 381; the emphases are his). For him, the large category is cognitive play, of which art—including the art of storytelling—is a subset. One of the chief functions of art is “to refine and retune our minds in modes central to human cognition—sight, sound, and sociality. . . .” Ibid. Thus, “ storytelling appeals to our social intelligence. It arises out of our intense interest in monitoring one another and out of our evolved capacity to understand one another through theory of mind .” Boyd, 382. The story that this manuscript tells would not have been new to reader-viewers, so the challenge is to engage their social intelligence by the way the story is interpreted, amplified, and visualized.

A transition at the opening of the next section of the first poem—“From the same kindred [as Jacob]” [Vz demselben chunne; l. 261]a child was born—connects the genealogy of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob with Mary, for the child is Joachim, who will be her father. The poem continues with the marriage of Mary’s parents, Joachim and Anne, leading to the birth of Mary and the story of her life through the Nativity and the return from Egypt after the death of Herod. This narrative is part of the central Christian myth. In ritual as celebrated in the cycle of the liturgical year, that myth is experienced episodically, as a series of key moments. The composition of Wernher’s poems appears to have been motivated in part by the introduction of new Marian feasts into the liturgy, for its three parts are organized around them: The Birth of the Virgin (Sept 8); the Annunciation (March 25); and the Nativity through Candlemas (when Mary and Joseph first took Jesus to the temple). But narrative has the option of filling in the gaps between these ritual, canonical moments. In the case of our poem, Wernher, a priest with pastoral responsibilities, explicitly addressed his poem to lay people. And though its stimulus may be liturgical, its concerns are not those of the fulltime religious but of the secular upper class.