Gothic Sculpture: Idols Old and New

This paper takes the medium of Gothic sculpture as an occasion to scrutinize older and newer ideas about medium, persuasion, making and materials. Its central concern is to try to distinguish a critical language appropriate to the Middle Ages which does not import ideas of much later, often post-Romantic, genesis. Above all it will ponder human artifice. It will consider the notion of occasion, and the public domain: Gothic stone sculpture will be treated as a form of public eloquence and not as the object of personal psychological reading or ‘empathetic’ engagement. The ‘affective turn’ in the study of medieval art will be treated as a form of expressive realism. The paper will then go on to challenge the current trend to ‘remagic’ sculpture through animist and materiality theory. Throughout the role of human thinking and feeling subjects will be prioritized: how art created and crafted experience in people.