Image as Insight

...Professor Miles's treatment of the sixteenth century is a striking and rewarding exercise...

...Nell Gifford.Martin static and, further, that one must evaluate the variable relations between "message given" and "message received...

...A police state enforces this polygamy and general policy with ruthless terror...

...2) to find a way into the past as experienced by those who did not leave written records, particularly women...

...Finally, the book is cluttered with too many agendas...

...The sense of pain and loss in the character, Fred, is conveyed less by his lines than by the abrupt changes in the way Harris carries himself, his macho strut giving way to a sag of weariness, his mocking tough-guy mask splashed suddenly with hurt...

...and followed by application to the twentieth century...

...early fourteenth-century Tuscan representations of women...

...they do provide messages from which people tbrm self-images, values, and attitudes...

...The real victory in Precious Sons belongs neither to Bea nor to the playwright but to Ed Harris, who has created a wonderfully complex wounded creature out of the materials that Furth has given him...

...Her demonstrations are preceded by a methodological chapter...

...We need intuition, certainly...

...Luther's Schloss Chapel in Torgau, Germany (1534), and Zwingli's GrossmOnster, Zurich, a Carolingian...

...As a result, the male oligarchy The book does not effectively address the methodological problem of safeguarding against proiection upon mute objects of the past...

...Secondly: visual tradition...

...These images, however, are not presented to place human life in its broadest and deepest context but to perpetuate a consumer culture...

...I would wonder, for example, whether Constantinian Roman church architecture and decoration, saddled as it was with Constantine's dual program of Christianizing the civil government and revalorizing the cult of the emperor, was sufficiently representative of fourthcentury Christian visual expressions to bear the weight of the generalizations here drawn from it...

...sophisticated...

...It's a tangle: just enough theory-and-method to point (a Wittgenstein term of art...

...church has not been studied in the Vest with anything like the thoroughness ai~pI'ed to Byzantine iconoclasm of the ~rV';qh and ninth centuries...

...Further, good wpmen could differ in the choice and use of some visual monuments...

...Fall, Spnng, and Summer-only study options, three and six week summer courses, four day weeks, and day and evening classes COSTS THAT AREN'T UNGODLY Rock-bottom room and board on a beautiful campus located a short walk from beaches and fifty minutes from Manhattan Minimum tuition For further information, call or wnte: Dr William Vendley, Associate Dean, Seminary of the Immaculate Conception Huntington, Long Island, N.Y 11743 Tel (516) 423-0499 It 25 April 1986:251...

...In this book, no more than in Plato, is the tension resolved...

...then we need a fuller model to flesh out the intuitions that arise from our contacts with the past...

...The Grossm/inster represents the most common solution of the time in "reformed" areas: retaining the formal structure of the building, but rendering its space unintelligible by removing such organizing marks as altars...

...Each effort would profit from treatment on its own terms...

...It was a time in which two quite difficult approaches were made to the balance between images and words...

...The knotty prior questions remain: what is the character of the knowledge we gain through our eyes...

...Ivey's impressive performance in an unattractive role is more than matched by Ed Harris's Fred...

...Images become idolatrous when they function as lifeorienting but serve the private commercial gain of a few individuals . . . . Churches, in abdicating responsibility for the training of vision, have failed to provide both life-orienting images and training in their critical appreciation...

...Miles urges a greater sensitivity to the often subliminal manipulation of our appetites by powerful suggestions...

...literate...

...He is also prone to ulcers and uncertainty, and to sudden indications of the love he has for all of them, offered in embarrassment and usually rejected...

...one has the feeling at times ,~ having stepped into a tennis stroke on the wrong foot...

...Today we are awash in visual images skillfully crafted to fashion our sensibilities and actions as consumers and as citizens...

...In her final chapter Professor Miles touches briefly upon what is, I suspect, the heart of the problem for Western historians: the failure ever to establish a stable and lasting resolution of the contradiction, articulated and considerably extended by Plato, between the enormously attractive power of Beauty and the inconstancy of the senses...

...Each demonstrates a sort of spatial rhetoric: the Gesti plays a hierarchical organization of space off against a dazzlingly mobile visual display to emphasize the dynamic relations of heaven and earth...

...What the play really seems to be and to avoid being is the sardonic story of a woman who saves her home, her security, by cutting loose her two sons (perhaps by sending them where they want to go) and destroying her husband in the process...

...Rather it may be -- and I suspect is -true that formal developments have a history of their own...

...Miles chooses to demonstrate the possibility of a visual/verbal interpretation within three areas in which her own exposure is strongest: church architecture and its decoration in Constantinian Rome...

...Ivey indicates Bea's areas of vulnerability, but there is never any doubt outside the fight scene that she controls what is going on in that house...

...Image As Insight concludes with an address to the twentieth century...

...Tom O'Brien l LIKE Margaret Atwood very much, but her new novel, The Handmaid's Tale, less...

...Image As Insight bears richer fruits in the chapters on the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries...

...not enough to elucidate for the critical newcomer a rigorous visual epistemology...

...And we need -- if we are to work across disciplines as this book attempts to do -- either to acquire fully the skills of each discipline we will engage, or to practice a deeper level of cooperation with one another so that we can avoid errors of fact and perspective that detract from our intentions...

...Finally, most interesting, Luther's Chapel deconstructs visual speech...

...It's not exactly the outlandishness of this that bothers me...

...With those qualifications in mind, Ms...

...Because historical method and hermeneutics are simultaneously up for revision, as preface to a programmatic analysis of non-verbal texts, the tbrm 25 April 1986:249of the book's argument sometimes becomes diffused in the process of defining all its parts...

...Siren's wail THE HANDMAID'S TALE Margaret Atwood Houghton Mifflin, $16.95, 311 pp...

...This is a hall for hearing...

...The play would be more honest with its material if it conveyed something of the horror of Strindberg's The Father...

...How can it be evaluated...

...The sc~:hdous iconoclasm that accompanied d':, ,~ationalization of parts of the Catho...

...How does it come about...

...GERALD WEALES Books: WITH A TUTORED EYE I MAGE AS INSIGHT is a work of exploration...

...It's an ambitious recasting of 1984, from a woman's point of view, positing a takeover of the United States by right-wing religious fanatics who establish a monotheocracy...

...INTERNATIONALLY RESPECTED FACULTY AND GUEST SPEAKERS An excellent resident faculty is complemented by outstanding guest lecturers DEGREE SPECIALIZATIONS Students may specialize in Scripture, Theology, Pastoral Liturgy, Pastoral Ministry, and Splntuahty in the Master of Arts Program FLEXIBLE SCHEDULES The School offers...

...At the end of the play, he turns down the advancement that would take him away from Chicago, blesses his actor son, and makes a tiny gesture of defiance by leaving open a door on the untidiness that his wife wants to screen from the guests who have begun to arrive to celebrate the marriage of which he disapproves...

...presumably unappreciative of the cognitive possibilities and expressive characteristics of objects, as opposed to texts...

...The historian who chooses to spread her net more broadly than texts must proceed aware of the elusiveness of her object and the strong possibility of projecting a desired outcome upon materials of the past...

...We need more studies like Geertz's own "Art as a Cultural System" that would examine the relative and variable "meanings" of purely formal elements such as shape and line within specific cultures and times...

...She is, according to the publisher's press release, "the first tenured woman professor in the three-hundred-year history of the Harvard Divinity School...

...Plato also, of course, gave us one of the most beautiful hymns to the love of Beauty (Phaedrus 249b-250b), "the fourth and last kind of madness...

...What is a visual tradition...

...After all, Bea's victory must be almost as empty for her as it is for us...

...The focal wall broken into planes, interrupted by vaults, destabilized...

...How can it be shared or passed on...

...In that sense, the stripping of churches, burning of crucifixes, whitewashing of frescoes, nationalization of treasures, defilement of tombs, all were cultic acts intended to revalorize that which can be learned by the senses...

...that runs Gilead turns all available women (divorcees, anyone married to a divorced man, or women who have lived with men) into second wives, handmaids, as long as they have "viable ovaries...

...The opening methodological section may try to do too much...

...The "reformers" of both parties recognized the influence of visual images: one party chose to destroy them, the other to maximize them...

...If that is the play at hand, then why the first-act histrionics, except as a high-note on which to bring down the curtain...

...It suggests that what Precious Sons is about is a strong woman's holding her family together against the wishes and without the knowledge of her insufficient husband...

...Here Professor Miles demonstrates how one mode of representation could address and serve radically different, even opposing, needs: on the one hand, effectively taming and containing the Other (a spiritually superior, threatening female...

...the anger and defeat in Harris's walk as he moves around the room and out the door says more than any exposition could about Fred's own youthful marriage and what it has become and about his disappointment in and for the son who does not, and cannot understand yet what he has done...

...She counsels "training oneself to choose and use images" critically, for the sake of spiritual and psychological development...

...A pre-opening interview with Ivey indicated that her character was being softened somewhat so that she would hot come across as a complete monster...

...It may be precisely at this point, of audience, that I find the book least successfid...

...She seeks a "historical hermeneutic" -- a method of historical study that could encompass both visual and verbal sources without reducing one to the other...

...conversely, sixtc~ ~ ~:hhcentury "Catholic" art is usually studied quite apart from contemporary ecclesiastical history, as stylistic development: the emergence of the Baroque...

...Bits of Foucault, Sassure-via-Barthes, Victor and Edith Turner, Clifford Geertz, Gadamer (all the "usual suspects") surface in text and notes...

...Is it "local knowledge," or universal, across space and time...

...and (3) to propose a therapeutic ascetic remedy for our present condition of visual saturation and manipulation...

...foundation drastically simplified during the sixteenth century...

...Our first official censor, Plato succeeded in convincing some that "custody of the eyes" was a necessary prior condition to the pursuit of truth...

...The archaeological method of Foucault assumes synchronicity to a sufficient degree that one can take a vertical "slice" of a culture at a moment in time, analyze it, come up with something to say...

...Through all biological changes she pursued a life of spiritual intensity and personal power...

...Precisely because artifacts are mute, their messages are multivalent...

...on the other hand, for others, offering a model and sign of hope: " . . . the plays, paintings, and popular devotions that deal with the life of the Virgin reveal a woman who was able to experience the events of girlhood, young womanhood, motherhood, old age, and death without being overwhelmed by their physical aspects...

...The former chapter focuses on common representations of the Virgin Mary and Mary of Magdala...

...In an inventive, suggestive move, Professor Miles pairs the two -"Protestant" iconoclasm and "Catholic" Baroque art -- as opposite faces of one phenomenon: perceptual reform...

...Atwood sets this in the near future, time enough, she imagines, for a crisis in fertility caused by AIDS, new strains of syphilis, and poisoning by environmental and toxic hazards...

...at the same time he acknowledged the somatic origin of knowledge (Miles cites Symposium 210a212b...

...To be fair to Furth, the final, small upbeat gestures may not be the playwright's attempt to tidy the situation for a likable curtain, but the character's way of papering over their despair...

...perhaps less than fully appreciative of non-verbal dimensions of life in general...

...At least three purposes are maintained here simultaneously: (1) to right the balance between visual and textual sources in the history of thought...

...In the absence of religious images, secular images funcCommonweal: 250 tion as life-orienting...

...This is a modified happy ending to a play that does not need it...

...My doubts about Precious Sons as a play do not extend to Judith Ivey and Ed Harris as Bea and Fred...

...In the scene in which his son announces his run-away marriage, Fred goes silent...

...Professor Miles's territory is the space where reading and seeing might meet...

...More broadly, late antique art, Christian and otherwise, had a history (rather, histories) of its own that might substantially modify the interpretations offered here...

...The only tools, according to the author, are a skilled eye, an active and sympathetic imagination, and long practice...

...His dependence on her at the end of the play suggests Doc's reliance on Lola at the conclusion of William Inge's Come Back, Little Sheba...

...As you may have gathered from the quotations, Image As Insight appears to have in mind an audience: theologically concerned...

...As Atwood notes, most of the things she depicts here have their parallel in contemporary events: in the attack on women's rights by some Protestant evangelicals and Islamic fanatics, and in the practice of government terror that she is all too familiar with as a member of Amnesty International...

...Professor Miles notes that the relation between texts and images is not given or IMAGE AS INSIGHT VISUAL UNDERSTANDING IN WESTERN CHRISTIANITY AND SECULAR CULTURE Margaret R. Miles Beacon Press, $24.95, 200 pp...

...Atwood even includes small topical EARN A MASTERS IN THEOLOGY DURING SUMMER VACATION...

...As examples, Miles focuses on three buildings: the high Baroque Chiesa del Gesti in Rome (1584), centerpiece of Jesuit church architecture...

...Professor Miles's own field is Western Christian history of doctrine, and her accomplishments in that field are already considerable...

...If that is the case, then the relation between the history of objects and the history of thought will have to be measured with a finer gauge...

...Augustine on the Body was published in 1979 in the American Academy of Religion Dissertation Series, followed in 1981 by Fullness of Life: Historical Foundations for a New Asceticism (Westminster...

...That this spiritual autonomy was even possible, medieval women would have known from no other source...

...For example, the introduction and opening chapter, which are devoted to method, rely upon an acquaintance with authors such as Foucault, Geertz,Wittgenstein -- exactly the kind of people one could scarcely read without becoming disabused of the very notions Professor Miles is out to combat...

...Not only does she refuse to leave Chicago, but she convinces Fred of his inability to do the job offered him even though his immediate boss and the head of the company think that, even without a college education, he can handle the more demanding position...

...9 . . [S]ince Christian churches have relinquished the task of providing life-orienting images, values, and attitudes, secular culture has seized the opportunity of filling the void...

...Refined sensibilities and a good eye are simply not enough to produce more than intuition...

...It has yet to be demonstrated that the history of formal developments (which issue in objects) is synchronous with the history of ideas, not to mention with the vagaries of governments or with tl~e complex syntheses of cultures and religions...

...and the conflict over visual expressions in the sixteenth century...