International
Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes,
Paris
Symposium 2006 Abstracts
Previous
jj -- jj Next
Symposium Program
"The Wicked Other, a Vicarious Sign of the Self in Twelfth Century Sculpture"
Peter Scott Brown, University of North Florida
This paper interprets a unique pictorial cycle of music-playing, dancing, drinking, vomiting, and fornicating figures depicted in the archivolt sculptures of the Romanesque church of St-Pierre at Sévignac, located in southwestern France. Vulgar, libidinous, impious drunkards are familiar characters in medieval French culture. They have many names: Saracen, Pagan, Navarrese, Basque, Getae, etc. However, these “barbarous nations,” others to the Gallic self, do not have a well-developed iconography in monumental sculpture. Profane and obscene images like those at Sévignac are not readily identifiable as representations of the barbarous other, for the simple reason that that they are visually indistinguishable from representations of the Gallic self. Among the Sévignac revelers, there is even an image of a tonsured priest. The traditional tendency to interpret this figure as a proxy for the servants of the church itself locates the entire pictorial cycle within the immediate ethnic and cultural space of the viewer, implying that the audience was meant to recognize itself in these lewd sculptures. On the contrary, I argue that wickedness, especially caricatured impropriety, is itself a motif of otherness in Romanesque sculpture.
In my analysis of the structure of the Sévignac cycle, I consider the problems inherent in interpreting pictorial narratives like this one that were available to disparate audiences of both lay and religious, male and female, etc. Was this diverse audience inclined to take such a reprobative view of itself? I suggest that profane images like those at Sévignac readily supported their audience’s displacement of its own questionable appetites onto the caricatured other. The obscenity of these representations of the morally inexcusable is adapted not to remind us of ourselves but to indulge our vicarious fascination with the shocking. The Sévignac revelers may be the medieval counterparts to our own culture’s popular images of bad guys, outlaws, pimps, and prostitutes in video games, television, film, and fiction. As with these popular images, perception of the Sévignac cycle depended in my view on the open-ended capacity of the image to mirror the disassociated appetites of the self, which when viewed at second hand take on the familiar aspect of the wicked other.