In search of lost dances

So, today I read a couple of articles by David Freedberg, who is an art historian interested in the interface between cognitive science, neuroscience, and art history. In particular, one of the articles concerns the way in which we experience artworks that represent or imply motion, and the emotions embodied by those motions. It is pretty chewy stuff, but to reduce it to fundamentals, it seems to me that he is arguing that recent findings in brain science strongly support a gut feeling that many art historians (and just people who look at art) have had (and have been encouraged to suppress for a whole slew of philosophical and ideological reasons I won't go into here) that art is deeply embedded in human emotion as it is experienced through the body and that a large part of its communicative power resides in the territory of affect. Essentially (I think), he's saying that the identification of what are called "mirror neurons" or neuronal pathways that are activated in identical ways whether one is observing, thinking about/imagining, or actually, physically doing or experiencing something, means that we can come at a better experience of how looking at work of art can trigger deeply somatic and emotional responses, and that these are indeed as much about biology as they are about culture. Many people have criticized Freedberg's work as being overly deterministic -- that is, that he gives biology too much credit and culture/context not enough, but actually reading his recent work convinces me that he's looking at the nexus between biology and culture in exciting new ways.

As a medieval art historian, I'm not terribly surprised to learn that the whole practice of human art making may rely on the neurological similarities between seeing and being, so to speak. Most of the art I work on banks on the assumption that the person looking at it can experience some real, transformative, process through interacting with the object. It can actually sculpt or paint or refashion one's soul, make one more receptive to God, or amplify one's internally voiced prayers so that such heavenly persons as Mary and the saints can hear them.

Right. What does this have to do with dance? Dance is not something you see a lot of in medieval art, unless, as in the dainty but perturbing image above (from a bronze column -- actually a ginormous candlestick -- cast around the year 1000 for Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim, in Lower Saxony), it's in the context of Salome dancing before Herod (clearly, not a "good" thing) or some other such vignette of sinfulness and abandon. In the very late medieval period, there's also the Dance of Death, a figure for the inevitability of death and its equalizing power (see Elina Gertsman's fabulous book).

There are some exceptions to this generally negative presentation of dance. For example, a perfectly decorously-dressed lady, her coif neatly pinned in place, dances in the margins of an 11th century Gradual (a book containing hymns and music for the Mass) now in the British Library (ms. Harley 4951, fol. 300) and I can think of a few examples from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that depict people dancing, holding hands and circling -- a sort of dance that I suspect is what dance historians call a carole or a basse-danse (though actual evidence of that kind of dancing comes along a little later). Also, sometimes David dances before the Ark.

Medieval images that are explicitly about dance, then, are rare. But I would not be the first person to say that often, when we look at medieval art, the figures seem to dance. Thus:

(That's a prophet from the south portal of the pilgrimage abbey of St.-Pierre, Moissac, in southwestern France, carved around 1120).

Or, these wise virgins from Magdeburg Cathedral, ca. 1250, who manage to dance without spilling their oil!

Perhaps it's a divine wind blowing their skirts to the left, but to me they seem very light on their feet, these ladies, and the regularity of their gestures makes them look very like dancers pantomiming, no?

If you feel almost like dancing when you stand before one of these sculptures, it may not be incidental or beside the point. Especially in art of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, I feel a current of rhythmic movement, a subdued but certain cadence to the gestures, that says "dance." Now, of course, there's the question of how much that particular response of mine has to do with the fact that I do dance, and have been dancing almost all my life. You could argue that for me, those mirror neurons are there, conditioned by environment/culture even if manifested in biological terms, and that a medieval person would not "mirror" dance when looking at these things because their brains weren't trained up that way. However, there's another possibility, which is that dance of a certain sort, stately, swishing, swaying, and entirely respectable, was playing a greater role in the public and domestic lives of people in the cities and towns where these images were being produced. We do know that by about 1400 social dancing, within very strict limits, was considered not only acceptable but even salubrious. It probably did not appear overnight.

I'm guessing -- and it's just a guess, of course... the real work that would be needed to fully work this out as an academic argument is pretty daunting -- that when twelfth or thirteenth century people looked at these "dancing" sculptures, they felt, (in Freedberg's words) as if they were dancing, and the particular kind of dancing that was taking place in their brains was not in the least frivolous, but spiritual and elevating.

Maybe what we can glimpse at Moissac and Magdeburg are steps from a long-lost choreography of joy.