Cathedrals as Living Drama

In art criticism, the eyes come first; all the cultural infrastructuring that places an object within its historical context can come later. Fortunately for Henry Kraus, 61, a Knoxville, Tenn., barber's son who studied mathematics in college and made a career out of medical journalism, he first fell in love with medieval cathedrals by feasting his eyes on them while a student at the Sorbonne. Before he ever cracked a book about it, Gothic art had become a secret passion. Now, with time to pursue it, he has written a revolutionary study, rediscovering scores of facts about medieval iconography and making the 12th and 13th centuries come to life with a vividness that is impressing even medieval scholars.

One of the most entertaining discoveries in Kraus's The Living Theatre of Medieval Art (Indiana University Press; $15) concerns the tympanum of the abbey church at Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, probably the earliest (circa A.D. 1130) monumental portrayal of the Judgment Day. Until Kraus came along, scholars had assumed that seven little men at Christ's feet represented souls of the blessed and the damned rising from their graves. Kraus, however, noted that they were clothed instead of naked, contrary to customary portrayals of souls, and that all were men (normally, some would be women). While four were either praying or pointing toward Jesus, three seemed to be lifting up their robes.

Pious & Pungent. Kraus thereupon deduced that all seven were in fact living Christians and Jews, each presenting his respective claims to salvation. The Jews were raising their hems in order to show that they were sons of Abraham, who by his circumcision sealed his people's covenant with the Lord. Kraus's findings, when first published a few years ago in a prestigious French art journal, caused a sensation in scholarly circles.

The cornerstone of Kraus's approach is that the cathedral is a series of frozen tableaux of medieval life, depicting not only its highest ideals and aspirations but also the age's pungent humor, conflicts and upheavals. He decisively abolishes the traditional cliche that the medieval church artist was a humble, self-effacing artisan who labored piously for the greater glory of God and his own salvation. Instead, Kraus emphasizes that at least 25,000 artists left recorded names, won high wages and even knighthoods for their work, and notes that workmen occasionally even went on strike when monastery food fell below expectations. To medieval France, religion was at least as important socially and economically as space exploration is for the U.S. today. In fact, it touched off a two-century-long building boom. "The artists themselves," Kraus concludes, "were an intimate, inseparable part of this current. The art they produced was a public art in the deepest sense."

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