Lepers and Kings | Encounters

The Lepers and the Kings

The 12th Century French Abbey of St. Pierre, Moissac

The Threshold

The word 'portal' has come to incorporate meanings in the 20th century that may not have been there in the 12th, or that may have been thought of differently. Little record remains from the Middle Ages of any contemporary awareness of the aesthetics of the portal. Art historians lament this fact, particularly with regard to the writings of Abbot Suger. Why was no record left? Suger wrote with such precision and eloquence - why did he not mention the portal sculpture? Is is possible that portals, which to the contemporary and relatively new discipline of art history are primary documents of the medieval period, may have carried a different significance in the Middle Ages? If that is so, is it possible to reclaim something of what the medieval significance might have been?

The concept of "portal" as referring to the door of a church and taking on, thereby, symbolic significance, belongs to art history. In its traditional usage the term, related to the Old French "portail," refers to the entire facade of a church and carries close and specific connotations of a city gate, with which it also shares many visual references. Both "portal" and "portail" derive from the Latin "porta," which comes from the root "par-," to pierce, to pass through." In Latin as well, the word refers to a city-gate but may also mean "entrance, outlet, passage" and may also carry symbolic overtones of strength, as in the term "the gates of hell" translated in the Vulgate as "portae inferi."

The term "portal," therefore, although specifically architectural, takes on meaning when examined within its cultural context. The city-gate marked a demarcation between one space and another, the space outside the gate being regarded as obeying different rules, being subject to a different order, than that within the gate. The gate opened within a clearly marked line separating the society within from threats from without. In theory, this line could not be crossed except through the gate, thus charging the gate as a point of power and also of vulnerability. The gate was both the strong and the weak point; it is, therefore, the point at which significant movement took place, but also the break in the wall of defense.

Awareness of the power of the gate dates back as far as the existence of gates themselves. Guardian figures protected the city gates of ancient Greece, as well as the ancient cities of Mesopotamia. Ancient popular rituals regarding the power of intricate figures probably explain the presence of spirals and interlaces at the doorways of tombs and other public entrances in Celtic culture. Cities such as Knossos may have relied on actual or symbolic labyrinths, in the form either of spirals or the more familiar multi-cursal labyrinth, to provide protection. The city of Troy may be understood to be a labyrinth, an impregnable, closed city whose magical defenses could be breached only by a ruse. [ 1 ]

Many folk cultures hold elaborate beliefs concerning the vulnerability and protection of the threshold. Even into the 19th century in Britain, the custom survived of drawing or laying a tangle at the doorway in the belief that evil spirits would be compelled to follow out the line to its end before entering the door. [ 2 ] The tangle corresponds on the popular level to the labyrinth laid out for the magical protection of the city. Labyrinths serve other purposes as well, besides that of defense against intruders; they may also serve as tests of prowess, perseverance, or worthiness, points of transformation from one state into another. In this context they appear in many cultures at the doors of tombs and may explain the incised spirals on the entrance rocks of Celtic burial sites. [ 3 ]

When labyrinths appear in Christian contexts, in the floors of cathedrals, for instance, they appear to have been used in a similar way - to provide an image of the transformation from one state to another. Often pilgrims followed out the lines of a labyrinth in the cathedral pavement on their knees as a form of penance similar to that of climbing the steps to the church at Le Puy on one's knees.

Labyrinths of this sort were unicursal: one path that bent back on itself many times. The psychological result of following unicursal labyrinths differs from that of the more familiar multi-cursal labyrinths which are designed to confound and, ultimately, to prevent entry. No such confusion exists with the labyrinth of a single path; one has only to continue in order to complete the course. The number of bends, however, creates a different sort of confusion, akin to disorientation. One emerges no longer sure of one's bearings, into a perceptually different world.

Inherent in the idea of the gate, therefore, is the provision of "a difficult but possible access to some important point." W.F.J.Knight identifies two principles involved in the protection of a gate: "the idea of defense and exclusion, and the idea of penetration, on correct terms, of this defense." [ 4 ] Passage through a gate, then, represented more than simply a movement in space but also a meeting of certain set conditions. One passed through by virtue of citizenship, knowledge, or prowess but in any case, entered a different world.

All of these ideas must be considered within the term "portal." Therefore, the resemblance of the portal, that is the doorway itself, of medieval churches, to Roman triumphal arches, must be seen not only as a reference to the triumph of Rome (equated then to the triumph of the Church) but also within its larger cultural and structural context. The emphasis that art history places on the portal as the doorway alone rests on its tendency to extract the most "visual" elements from the whole, redefining terms (in this case the term "portal") in such a way that the larger context, which should properly constitute the work of art, does not receive attention. [ 5 ]

Just as the term "portal" has come to mean the "entrance...of an edifice, when emphasized in architectural treatment," [Oxford] so the discipline of art history has come to regard only that architecturally emphasized portion of the edifice as being significant. The concept of the portal, in fact, came to acquire a life of its own in art historical literature, quite apart from its structural role within the walls of the sacred precinct. Rather than examining the portal as an opening in the wall of defense, art historians have tended to frame the portal as though it were a painting and to apply to it methods of analysis more properly suited to painting. Several consequences result from this.

Removed from its social and architectural context, the portal makes very little sense. Without its "local associations" it can easily be regarded as a part of a different set of associations, in this case, other emphasized entranceways. A scholar concerned with the set of emphasized entranceways will then wish to order these examples in some way, a logical order being that of chronology. This is, in fact, what happened early in the development of formal scholarly investigation of these monuments, the controversy dominating research for some time. The consequences of such diversions, however, still affect the discipline, for they did more than simply drain energy with problems that cannot be resolved or are of questionable importance, they effectively defined the terms for the discussion of such subjects. A preoccupation with "first causes," or "points of origin," for instance, reinforces a construct - "Romanesque" - that, while useful in a limited way to later scholars may or may not have had anything to do with the life of the work itself.

In fact, a sculptured portal cannot be compared to any other visual art form or be discussed in the same terms. A portal by its nature is a passageway from one space to another; it cannot, therefore, be seen in isolation. Extracting it visually from its architectural context falsifies it for it implies that the work is meant to be seen from a fixed position and that only by chance, or for reasons having to do only with other portals, does it appear as it does.

Most scholarly examinations of portal sculpture make use of photographs of that sculpture taken from a more or less ideal point of view. Tympana, for example, are usually photographed from scaffolding so that they may be viewed at eye level, as though they were framed paintings that just happened to be hung high on the wall. Such photographs, which define the terms of the examination as decisively as do linguistic terms, imply that the correct viewpoint of a tympanum is from a position floating somewhere in mid-air and that therefore any other viewpoint is flawed. At best, such photographs limit lines of inquiry based on the tympanum as actually seen.

Within the conception of the portal as passageway, however, rather than as ideal attribute of the church, the sculpture must have been conceived with that passage in mind. The designers of portal sculpture must have taken into account its relationship to a viewer who moved through the portal. Such an understanding of portals would be more in keeping with their relationship to city gates as openings in boundary walls as well as to Roman triumphal arches which were essentially processional in character. Any single photograph of a portal, therefore, must be regarded as a detail both of the physical whole (the sum of successive views) and the experiential whole (the time and movement necessary to complete passage). In the same way, study of the portal from a single point of view, as though the portal were a painting, or a composite of paintings, overlooks the unity of the conception of the doorway as well as its unique character.

While the nature of sculpted portals as passageways within boundary walls may be the single most significant factor that links each member of the set of "emphasized doorways," their individuality separates them. Again, art historical literature tends to try to establish connections among successive examples of architectural sculpture, and the attempt to do so has justified as well as required the establishment of relative chronology. Theories that rest only on scholarly opinion but whose vulnerability may be only rarely acknowledged may therefore be upset with revisions in dating. [ 6 ] On the other hand, theories based on existing knowledge may be devised which, in turn, may be called upon to justify decisions of date. [ 7 ] Within these layers of complication, the individuality of the monuments in question often becomes lost, with the result that each is regarded only in its supposed relationship to a theory devised centuries after its creation.

While these scholarly efforts serve their purpose and help to elucidate the general flow of creative forces, they also overlook the particularity of creativity. They overlook the personal, the individual, the feel of stone, the weather, the history of a community, the life of the land. The building of a church represented a particular relationship to the concept of sacred space. Each church carried within it a history of the sacredness of the site on which it was built. Some were built to celebrate an event, such as a martyrdom, some as the result of an instruction, such as a vision, and others adopted sites that had been sacred long before the coming of Christianity. In any case, the particular character of each site became a part of the church's personality, a personality its sculpture and its architecture might conflict with or conform to.

The tension arising from the convergence of individual forces within the creation of the visual form resulted in the particular message conveyed by the site. The iconography of the portal provides the most obvious and easily deciphered form of that message, but the whole church, the entire complex of the church, in fact, including its relationship to its secular surroundings, constitutes the combined elements of that message.

And it is a message that logically contains multiple meanings. The Moissac portal stood at a crossroads - of passages, of cultures, of ways of thinking - and crossroads are powerful places. They are sites of disruption, transformation, and paradox, operating on many levels simultaneously. To study such a place means to allow oneself to be caught in the tangle, to fall into a aesthetic trap that is centuries old.

Notes

1. Janet Bord, Mazes and Labyrinths of the World (New York: Dutton, 1975). return to text

2. Bord, Mazes and Labyrinths. return to text

3. See John Layard, "Maze Dances and the Ritual of the Labyrinth in Malekula," Folk-Lore, June, 1936, pp. 123-170 and Paolo Santarcangeli, Le Livre des labyrinthes (Florence: Editions Gallimard, 1974). return to text

4. W.F.J. Knight, "Maze Symbolism and the Trojan Game", Antiquity, vi, No. 24, 1932: 446. return to text

5. A similar revision has occurred in the area of manuscript studies with the work of Delaissé and others. Those scholars in the field of codicology have pioneered in expanding the view of art history to include the entire manuscript, with all its vagaries, as being conceptually the work of art. R.G.Calkins has repeatedly insisted on the unity of the double page opening of a manuscript and, in fact, of the succession of double page openings. Such an approach rejects the assumption that the illumination can be extracted, figuratively or literally, from the context in which it exists, for to do so would be to examine only a detail of the work. Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983) and Programs of Medieval Illumination (Lawrence, Kansas: Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1984). return to text

6. Such a situation is recounted by M.F.Hearn in a footnote to his discussion of Charlieu: "Francis Salet...cast doubt upon the completion of the church and portal as early as 1094. He did not advance an argument to support a later date, and it seems safer at present to hold to the traditional date until evidence for a new one is forthcoming. If the portal was later, though, then the Charlieu portal can be withdrawn from its central place in the problems concerning the origins of Romanesque sculpture in Burgundy." Romanesque Sculpture: The Revival of Monumental Stone Sculpture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981) 136, n. 33. Now while this kind of discussion may be necessary it is also, nonetheless, essentially radical in its tacit acknowledgement of the relativity of all art historical knowledge. What we "know" may be at any moment overturned by a chance discovery. return to text

7. Many of the decisions of the dating of the Moissac portal itself rest on theories of the development of style: "Recognizing the advanced character of the portal..." Hearn 170, n. 1 (italics mine). return to text