Analyze of Gothic Ivories

Analysis of Gothic Ivories
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Analysis of Gothic Ivories
Title of art-journal article: Meaningful Spectacles: Gothic Ivories Staging the Divine
Author and year: Guerin, Sarah M. 2013
The art-journal article is basically focusing on the history of Gothic ivories in the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. The author provides a discussion of the mixture of micro-architecture and carved elephant ivory, how the micro-architecture worked to symbolize church’s role in eschatology, and the role of the church in accessing saints of Catholic as well as the phrase tabernaculum to denote Gothic ivories. The author continues to offer a discussion of the fame of sacrament dwellings as protecting covers for the Eucharist in France, the metaphors that are related to ivory and the Virgin Mary, as well as the relationship that King Solomon had to the metaphor. In essence, the is the strategic utilization of micro-architectural frames in consecrated and revered ivory carvings of 13th century Western Europe.
Main ideas and their substantiating evidence
The author examines the underlying principle behind the enveloping usage of microarchitectural forms on ivory carvings from the Middle Ages. In the article, the author mentions various earlier scholars and their perspectives on the subject of interest: the usage of microarchitectural frames in thirteenth century Western Europe. These earlier scholars include Ernst Gombrich and Panofsky. Referring to Gombrich, Sarah Guerin affirms that ivory diptychs were amongst the objects, which were inertly embellished and decorated with the fashionable architectural ornaments of the thirteenth century. The use of microarchitectural frames was a prevalent phenomenon during the Gothic period. The author points out that the notion of Panofsky was that the Scholastic intellectual formation did shape a mental habit which produced what is presently known as Gothic architecture. In Gothic scholasticism and architecture, Panofsky redefined the period’s aesthetic inclination and its style by essentially replacing Zeitgeist with the habit of the mind, or habitus. In looking at microarchitecture as a bearer of meaning and in assigning it a semiological role, Sarah Guerin moves away from both Gombrich and Panofsky’s stylistic discourse, and away also from the conventional discussion of microarchitecture as ornament.
In the article, ornament is defined as a facet of decoration which does not have any other purpose rather than to enhancing its carrier. Sarah Guerin asserts that to see ornament generally and especially microarchitecture as a formal aspect superfluous of a work disregards the semiotic functions of ornament and mainly concentrates on terpnopoietic aspects, that is, the pleasure-bringing attribute of ornament. The author states that examining Gothic ivories from a dissimilar viewpoint shows that a governing metaphor has formed their confi...