Dissimilar Similitudes by Bynum Caroline Walker;

Author:Bynum, Caroline Walker;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zone Books
Published: 2020-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

Calling the ceremony a “consecration rite,” Freedberg remarks: “It is significant that many [such] rites involve the last stages of completing an image and bringing it to life.”60 Scholars have recently struggled with a variety of concepts, such as “distributive agency” and “representation,”61 to express what is happening in these ceremonies, but whatever refinement of terminology they use, they stress that the power of an Other is here emerging in the material object we call an image.

For Freedberg and for many other scholars, the eye-opening ritual in Buddhism, Hinduism, and ancient China has provided a paradigm.62 In fact, the Indian example makes it clear that the process is lengthier and more labile than a focus on providing eyes suggests. Indian images come to life in a series of rites or processes, from the initial selection of appropriate material for carving (wood from a male tree for a male god, for example) to awakening by the chiseling or painting in of eyes. Although the image is “made” by those who carve and anoint it, the god is latently present, lying, as Nammāḻvār put it, like “butter … in fresh milk.” The image is then bathed, dressed, and adorned with unguents, and the devotee both recognizes and is recognized, locking eyes with the god (darshan).63 Presence depends on the lengthy process of handling the god and on the expectation, which itself must be prepared, of the devotee.

Recent discussions of the parallels between Western and non-Western images have helpfully complicated earlier descriptions of the art of the European Middle Ages. As I have discussed elsewhere, standard textbook accounts of the iconoclastic controversy in the early Middle Ages have been misleading in their tendency to focus on theology more than practice.64 Nor do traditional accounts adequately describe the awe-ful potency of the images that were increasingly feared and rejected in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.65 Thus, it has been crucial for historians to jettison formulations that see Western images as simply triggers of devotion, inducements to something beyond or other than the images.66 Non-Western cases have helped European medievalists rediscover the power of images themselves.

Nonetheless, much of the recent study of Christianity seems to me to adduce the wrong Western/non-Western comparisons. Not only is it misleading to compare Durga and Mary as if their processions were parallel, it seems misleading to assume that we will probe the nature of sacred presence most deeply if we compare statues. As I explained earlier, much recent work is predicated on the assumption that comparanda are, and should be, morphological—that is, visually similar. Indeed, in all this work, scholars have tended to treat the really interesting parallel as that of anthropomorphic image to anthropomorphic image; the starting point is thus “look-alikes,” especially human “look-alikes.” Implicated in this is the use, especially by art historians, of the term “image” (imago) to designate what has come in the West to be considered “art,” although historically the term refers to figures of speech and ontological relationships as well.67 Yet surely what

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