Description
Book SynopsisExplores how the distinctive formal and material qualities of a range of Romanesque sculpture types stimulated multisensory religious experiences. Emphasizes the power of these sculptures to “come alive” in ritual and produce emotional responses for Christians of the time.
Trade Review“Dale describes a historical sea change in European Christianity at the end of the first millennium, evident in the formation of Romanesque sculpture, which he masterfully explores. Pygmalion’s Power shows how the religious sense of embodiment condensed physically and metaphysically in this period and enabled a conception of vision whose materiality laid the groundwork for everything that followed in religious imagery and art. Dale’s book makes a welcome contribution to the history of images, deftly bringing art, theology, devotional practice, and visual experience together in an account that deepens our understanding of Romanesque sculpture and its implications for the history of art and religion thereafter.”
—David Morgan,author of Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment
“The eleventh and twelfth centuries in Western Europe witnessed a level of sculptural production unequaled since antiquity. Thomas Dale offers a fresh and compelling account of this phenomenon, focusing on how the very materiality of Romanesque sculpture helped patrons and audiences make sense of their world. This book will be of wide interest to historians of medieval art, as well as to anyone interested in the problem of the senses.”
—Kirk T. Ambrose,author of The Marvellous and the Monstrous in the Sculpture of Twelfth-Century Europe
“In Pygmalion’s Power, Thomas Dale replaces the outdated master narrative of Romanesque sculpture with a brilliant new history of materials, meanings, and functions. Considering both the normative—portraiture and the ideal nude—and the ‘disruptive other’ of the monstrous and the lustful, he delves into issues of the body as model, as admonition, and even as musical instrument to be played rightly. Finally, characterizing the church itself as body, he demonstrates how sculpture could activate the senses and allow perception of the divine.”
—Cynthia Hahn,author of Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400–circa 1204
“The reasons for sculpture’s ‘revival’ and its vital eventual role in the visual culture of the Middle Ages have long dogged the narrative of medieval art. Dale offers an original and thought-provoking rewriting of the problem by exploring sculpture’s new spiritual embodiment, decisively showing how viewers’ psychological investment in sculptural objects—stone sculpture in a cloister, reliquaries in crypts, carved wooden Crucifixions—animated the works and gave them meaning. Pygmalion’s Power represents a significant reorientation for medieval sculpture studies and offers a welcome challenge to older orthodoxies.”
—Robert A. Maxwell,author of The Art of Medieval Urbanism: Parthenay in Romanesque Aquitaine
“This is a major contribution to understanding Romanesque art. The so-called Pygmalion effect should be presented in every course on Romanesque art.”
—D. K. Haworth Choice
