Sculptural Seeing will be welcomed by medievalists across disciplines. Analyzing a select number of questions in the light of material history, medieval science, optics, and Augustinian theology, it will contribute to further interdisciplinary explorations of relief sculpture as a historically specific genre. Richly illustrated, Lakey's book opens new opportunities for integrating these histories with integral issues of time, chronology, and successions of form and style.
The author focuses on examples from Duecento to Quattrocento Italy (North and Central), especially the famous Pisa and Pistoia pulpits by Giovanni and Nicola Pisano, and sculpted programs on the cathedrals of Ferrara and Modena, with further examples from Aosta, Fidenza, and Verona. “Relief, Optics, and Medieval Perspective” introduces the five chapters, presenting a new definition of “Embodied Seeing” (including Augustine's theory of three visions and discussions of medieval science's approaches to vision and cognition) and “The Iconology of Sight.” Visual analysis is set into relationships with crucial texts, e.g., Dante's Divine Comedy, commentaries on Aristotle by Albertus Magnus and Aquinas, and Alhacen's De aspectibus. The chapters on “The Geometry of Vision” and “Optical Aesthetics and the Problem of Looking Right” are followed by a more experimental exploration of a wider variety of material objects and media. Finally, the author traces later art theory right up to Alberti (“Words for Relief [Rilievo]”); however, this important section seems too short to fully explore the selected artworks and monuments with their extensive bibliographies.
Lakey's illuminating descriptive survey of medieval sculptures reconstructs some of the viewing conditions of surviving in situ architectural relief sculpture. The author further engages his chosen sculptural reliefs with contemporary painterly solutions to issues of spatial organization, scale, figural conditions, perspective, and relief in wall painting. Lakey does not simply shift perspective (as defined by Panofsky, with Dürer) earlier on a conventional timeline. Nor does he merely confirm the nature of perspective as a development (Damisch); or simply retrace some of the more distant philosophical stakes of relief (from Herder to Merleau-Ponty). He instead models a multilayered approach that fully explores his chosen objects’ intended viewing conditions. His case studies demonstrate how much Romanesque and Gothic works benefit from a similarly careful descriptive integration. Starting with the Modena facade program by Wiligelmus, the strength of Lakey's analysis is particularly palpable in the trajectory of chapters 2, 3, and 4, which host a series of less well-studied works, all presented in a dialogue with relevant manuscript sources.
Many of the ways in which medieval relief supports or undermines perspective with its own properties and potential have been obscured by the overwhelming impact of Adolf Hildebrand's Das Problem der Form in der Bildenden Kunst (1893) and his preoccupation with classical reliefs (and his own neo-classical production). Remedies were provided (but not always fully appreciated) in works by Adrian Stokes, John Pope-Hennessy, and Michael Podro, among others. The spatial and perceptional complexities of medieval and Renaissance relief have since received increasingly more nuanced attention since, including innovative approaches by Whitney Davis, Geraldine Johnson, Jacqueline Jung, Luca Palozzi, David Summers, and others.
With its focus on medieval conditions of making and seeing, Lakey's project positions itself in the context of a new generation in sculpture studies that interweaves the layers of contemporary evidence—archaeological, architectural, contextual, textual, visual, and theoretical—to answer distinctly modern questions. Naturally, this wide panorama includes theological iconology and political iconographies. In this way the book contributes to the many future answers that scholarship will have to provide in response to the big challenge of Hubert Damisch's account of the origin of perspective as involving “a whole perceptual, sensory body of previous knowledge, from which it constructed a new departure” (Yve-Alain Bois et al, “A Conversation with Hubert Damisch,” October 85 [1998]: 5f). With its select, narrowly focused set of questions and examples, the book offers important new case studies to exemplify how this new departure began generations before the typically cited moment in early Quattrocento Florence.
