Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture by Jacqueline E. Jung (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture by Jacqueline E. Jung Masha Goldin Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture. By Jacqueline E. Jung. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. xi + 327. Cloth $75.00. ISBN 9780300214017. As any researchers, art historians sometimes fail to acknowledge the outdatedness and problematics of the legacies of their discipline's founders. Preoccupied with our objects of study, we also occasionally pay little attention to our working toolkit—writing devices, photographic reproductions, etc. In the research of Gothic sculpture, the Wölfflinian tradition of fixation on an "ideal" point of view on sculptures and the attempts to capture it by camera are a case in point. Opposing the dynamic nature of this type of sculpture, such scholarly tendencies led to misconceptions of Gothic sculpture. In Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture, Jung suggests a remedy: through a rigorous reconstruction of medieval encounters between viewers and sculpted bodies, she demonstrates that Gothic sculpture was intended to be perceived and was indeed experienced via "multifocal, embodied beholding" (9). As a point of departure, in the first chapter, Jung describes how sculptures came to be designed as responding "to the real movement of beholder's bodies" (58). She dates the introduction of this interactivity to the beginning of the thirteenth century and contrasts it with earlier sculptural renderings of human bodies, characterized by physical stiffness and emotional reserve. Building on this dichotomy between "presentational" and "interactional" sculptures (19), Jung prepares the ground for her overarching claim that Gothic sculpture is particularly relatable, charismatic, and eloquent. In his review of the book, Paul Binski questioned Jung's claim of the exceptionality of Gothic sculpture, recalling that naturalism is but one of a variety of historical visual modes to charge figural representation with affective powers (Oxford Art Journal 44.1, 2021). We should perhaps ask ourselves whether Gothic sculpture seems relatable, especially to us, with our contemporary sensibilities conditioned by visual media with its incessant onslaught of depictions of the human figure. But the more important lesson that Eloquent Bodies imparts is that Gothic sculptors achieved this quality not merely through heightened emotionality but also through a dynamic sense of space and beholding. Chapters Two to Five present a thorough study of the effects of some famous thirteenth-century sculptural groups from cathedrals in the historical boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire (chosen both for their "enlivenment of space" and the author's determination to alter our approach to them, 6). Thus, optical corrections along the Pillar of Angels in Strasbourg; the carved soles of the Wise and Foolish Virgins from [End Page 489] Magdeburg; the passageway behind the donor figures of the Naumburg Cathedral; and many other mostly overlooked details of these sculptural cycles, Jung interprets as artistic devices designed to influence viewers to comprehend the sculptures as bodily presence. For Jung, such experience of three-dimensional images as having "affinity with the living" (186) could be generated only through a process of viewing—understood as unfolding in time and space. In this process, the figural sculptures were viewed as parts of whole visual ensembles that were gradually revealed as the congregation moved in the ecclesiastical space, to which Jung also pays attention. Overall, Eloquent Bodies presents a threefold argument. The first facet here is a critique of the scholarship on Gothic sculpture: too often, it neglected the "viewer's kinetic capacities" (32). Overlooked was also the other side of the coin: that Gothic sculpture was shaped by the stone carvers' awareness of the viewers' mobility. This blind spot, according to Jung, is rooted in art historians' reliance on photographic reproductions of sculptures, which often show them from alien or even unattainable viewpoints to most viewers (e.g., from a perspective on a ladder). Consequently, Jung contends, when focusing on these understudied aspects of Gothic sculpture and overcoming the photographic limitations, it becomes evident that the sculptures could elicit the beholders' identification. With the aim of showing how Gothic sculpture constructed this empathetic spectatorship, Jung draws not only on primary sources and historiography but mainly on personal experience and experiments in situ...