In the German realm in the late Middle Ages, dancing was cause for both celebration and concern. Poets crafted animated accounts of boisterous roundelays welcoming winter and summer, municipal leaders designated festival days when citizens were permitted to whirl and shuffle in city squares, and churchmen admonished Christian youths to beware the seductions of frivolous young ladies on the dance floor. In short, literary and administrative texts evoke the appeal and hazards of dance, both as pastime and performance, in the southern part of the Holy Roman Empire, circa 1450 to 1500. Scholars of medieval art, however, have seldom probed the array of images showing couples spinning, performers leaping, and folks on the sidelines being enticed into the joyful fray. This lecture examines illuminations, wall paintings, prints, and sculptures that capture a variety of attitudes toward dancing in the regions of Bavaria and Austria in the second half of the fifteenth century. Clerics may have condemned dancing as a tool of the devil that irresistibly leads to unchastity and thereby damnation, but artistic evidence indicates that laypeople were willing to take their chances. In public images and small-scale works targeted to wealthy urban audiences, viewers could learn about the risks of dance, but also find encouragement to step out and join the party.
Nina Rowe is a Professor of Medieval Art History at Fordham University in New York City. Her books include The Jew, the Cathedral, and the Medieval City: Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge UP, 2011) and The Illuminated World Chronicle: Tales from the Late Medieval City (Yale UP, 2020), as well as edited volumes, most recently: Whose Middle Ages?: Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past (Fordham UP, 2019). She has held fellowships from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and she served as President of the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA), 2020-2023.
Organised by Dr Tom Nickson (The Courtauld) and Dr Jessica Barker (The Courtauld).
This event is kindly supported by the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA). Series made possible through the generosity of William M. Voelkle.
Well good evening everybody we’re GNA make a start uh it’s really lovely to see so many people here tonight um and uh it’s my pleasure to introduce uh our speaker tonight my name is Tom Nixon I teach Calen medieval art and architecture and I’m going to in a moment uh introduce
Both this speaker and this event the annual icma Cal lecture before I do that I want to just very briefly um highlight a couple of events that are coming up here that might be of interest uh to some of you um first uh this um the final session this seminar in our
Medieval work on progress seminars uh on the 6th of March when Elena Paulina Montero will talk about chivalry Justice and love um about Royal architecture in 14th century Castile um and then uh we also have have on the 26th of March our very own uh Professor Alex bovie giving
Her inaugural professorial lecture uh the house of murth ethics of laughter and ridiculous gothic art U both of those highly recommended in their different ways um and you can oh no it’s fully booked well maybe there’ll be a you know you can sh dra that’s the the
Uh yeah uh star actor but you but there may well be you know there’s always no shows so if you can um but I um want to turn to the business of this evening which is to introduce our speaker but first I wanted to say a a few words about the icma the
International Center of medieval Arts this lecture series uh NE and I were just looking up was uh established in 1999 I think with John Laden and John Joanna Canan here at the coural as a way um for the icma to make its presid pres known in the UK and for uh students and
Scholars and those interested in medieval art to hear also from uh Scholars based in the US and the icma as you may know is uh the foremost and in some ways be the only um uh kind of um umbrella Organization for uh those interested in medieval art both in North
America but also across the globe um and Nina who was formerly president of the icma can speak to this but what I would like to do uh for you now is just to as they were give not a very hard sell but to really encourage you if you don’t
Know about the International Center for medieval art to look them up and to join um uh you can see if you uh click here that they are a reasonable incredibly reasonable rate actually for students uh just 20 usar and and for that you get uh
Gesta a hard copy of gesta which as it says is the Premier scholarly journal for the history of medieval art um uh and you get online and print access to that you get the icma news which is a really fantastic uh resource and way of finding out what’s going on uh both in
North America and Beyond a whole series of study days principally in uh the us but also uh in connection with other exhibitions around the world and other events um the icma sponsors uh a number of conference sessions they have a whole series of Grants and awards uh they have
Mentorship schemes uh and they just uh are a kind of um an opportunity for meders to get together and sort of love one another and feel supported and uh part of a kind of a broader community and um uh I really recommend it to you um
So having done the Soft Cell on uh the icma it’s my pleasure now to introduce our speaker Professor Nina R uh who as I mentioned is a former president of the icma she was there for uh 20 from 2020 to 2023 I think uh not easy years to be
President of the icma in many many ways um uh but she’s also Professor uh of uh our history at forom University and the author of a number of major Publications most recently her book The illuminated World chronical Tales from the late medieval city was published by Yale University press in
2020 um she also has an important study uh the Jew the cathedral and the medieval city synagoga and Ecclesia in the 13th century that was published by Cambridge in uh does say here I think it was about 2012 2013 um uh and as well as numerous other articles you might know
Her uh particularly as the editor of a uh collection of essays published in studies and iconography in 2012 um medieval art history today critical terms that’s a a set of essays that I return to uh a great deal and if you don’t know those essays I uh really
Encourage you to go and look at those uh just for thinking about the key critical terms in our history um I think that Nina contributed one on on other for that set of essays she also was a co-editor of whose Med whose Middle Ages teachable moments for an ill-used past in uh
2019 um uh also a very useful resource for thinking about uh the Middle Ages and how we can think about it through the lens of current political debates and issues um so tonight uh Nina is going to speak for about an hour we have time for questions after that and then I
Hope that you’ll be able to join us in the Research Forum uh afterwards for some drinks and more informal conversation but I’m going to dim the lights now um oh one one final thing I should say this session is being recorded will go online uh some of you
Might know that the speakers are quite sensitive here or that or the um microphone so don’t say anything scandalous cuz sometimes it can uh get picked up by the microphones and uh that has happened before um uh but uh thank you very much Nina I’m going turn down the lights and
Perhaps we can welcome you to [Applause] the all right I’ll say thank you while you’re working on the lights oh it’s so nice to be here thank you for the lovely introduction it’s really an honor and a thrill um and so I just want to offer a
Few words of thanks I know we’re all eager to get going but I am truly grateful to Tom Nixon and to Jessica Barker for the invitation to come here to the courtold and especially to Tom for managing arrangements for the visit and at the icma I thank our the current
President Steve Perkinson and the executive director Ryan pringer and I really I want to offer my special thanks to my esteemed colleague William Bill Bley whose generosity over the years has sustained this lecture series um and this series it just does so much to bolster transatlantic connections and collaborations among
Medieval art historians so this one’s for you Bill so here we go can we make it a little darker talk yeah that’s good right yeah that’s good okay in the cities of Southern Germany in the decades around the year 1500 Urban leaders were concerned about dancing an entry in the meeting minutes
Of the nberg city rot from 1485 reports that the men of the council have noticed and taken to Heart the disorder orderly frivolity and expense that one sees with dancing so much so they go on to claim that to an uncomfortable degree reputable members of society oftentimes
Are consumed with the practice and I I put up on the screen now a snippet of that text in English with the key terms in bold and beneath it is the Middle High German original along with an image of nberg from the lia chronic Kum just to evoke at City
Feld and another entry in the nberg municipal archives from 1495 even more explicitly forbids the quote many unusual and unseemly new dances which daily are adopted the text laments that these dances without a doubt are displeasing to God Almighty and it makes a pronouncement that going forward entertainers or minstrels are
Barred from encouraging the good men and women of nurg to get riled up with dances that depart from the traditional modes now what specifically might have been troubling to the members of the nberg city council in 1495 this administrative body granted permission for various kinds of dances
Every year at fosnot or Carnival indeed we have from nberg detailed accounts of about which members of the urban populace were permitted to dance and parade around the the city streets in those days before lent but here the dancing seems to have spilled out into the everyday and the
Kind of dancing being taken up was unsettling because it was in some way new and so it seems that the men of the nurg RS sought to reain in festivities or to put up guard rails around Customs already in play that were pushing the limits of the acceptable now this is all interesting
From the standpoint of social history or the history of late medieval Urban celebrations but what does this evidence reveal to us as art historians either in relation to depictions of dancing or in terms of the audiences for images of Dance Now on the former question some Scholars consider the new mode of
Dancing referenced in that second passage up on the screen to have been moves borrowed from peasant festivities but I propose that at least in part it was the kinds of twisting and gyrating on display here which were of concern for that second Norberg text goes on to Levy fines against the
Entertainers or minstrels who spur men and women to engage in dances specifically where participants Embrace and and spin around one another now there is ample spinning around and personal engagement here in these reliefs that you’re looking at and it is easy to imagine that dance performances like those depicted here inspired hip
Shaking and twirling and grasping among audience members viewing the spectacle the sculpted reliefs up on the screen are details of an ensemble ornamenting an oral installed Circa 1500 on a Civic building not in nberg but farther south in the same same cultural orbit in insbrook in the tahan region of
Austria and these dancing figures also were created to Adorn a municipal space one that was not far away in Munich they were made around the year 1480 now these sculptures that I’m showing you of men twirling and leaping around created in the final Decades of the 15th century in Munich and inbrook
Depict performers in the throws of a mode of dancing that was a veritable craze at the time a vigorous choreography that looks very different than images of more restrained chain dances such as that shown in this Fresco from Circa 1390 the measured movements delineated here may well represent the kinds of
Traditional dances that the men of the nurg city council sought to retain and to promote we see a Grace ful and demure dance where people link up by holding hands and move and they move in unison a crowned lady leads the group with alternating men and women gotten up
In the elite Fashions of the day trailing behind the jumble of people at the right where the man in two-toned hose seems to reach back with his left arm and to take the hand of The Woman in Red suggests the tangle of a cah or a round delay
Dance where people snake in in and around sometimes in a line sometimes in a circle evidence that this mode was judged to be beautiful and elegant and honorable is found in descriptions of Court dancing and Middle High German literature passages such as a as a snippet from the toyana cre By Conrad v
Vburg a text composed around the 1280s and which remained popular into the 15th century in Conrad’s estimation quote there has never been a nicer round delay made up from any company than that which one sees winding here and there but it is not all gential padding
Around on the Dance Floor even in those traditional modes for Conrad continues that at these dances feet Shuffle softly and then soon start to LEAP so although late medieval images from the Bavarian and Austrian region might refrain from showing gentlemen and ladies hopping about epic texts can Delight in descriptions of energetic
Dances suggesting that members of the nobility or high ranking Burgers of cities habitually were spirited of foot when they were part of a cah hole now this Fresco you’ve been looking at is in schlo ronlin a complex in what is now Bano Italy but was part of the
Tahan region of the medieval Austrian realm several days walk south of insbrook the family who owned rlin castle at the time when this Fresco was painted were Regional administrators of the Empire and like Nobles and top tier Urban entrepreneurs of the day they decked their halls with images of
Arthurian epics tournaments and pastimes such as ball games and dancing the wall painting and sculptures I’ve introduced Place Us in the space of performance and participation the ballroom the Civic Hall the city Square where people viewed and took part in dances the Conrad Von bsur snippet of
Text that I cited suggests that at the end of the 14th century when the Fresco on the left was painted folks in actuality were not quite as stiff on the dance floor as they appear to be in the painted image and the quotes I shared from The
Archives of the nurg rot at my opening indicate that by the end of the 15th century there was something newly freewheeling about the ways in which men and women were twirling on the dance floor and that these men and women Drew inspiration from performers and that Civic authorities could find such
Practices to be socially destabilizing but if the images that you’re looking at speak to the practices of Dance what about the theory of dance for people in the orbit of tle and up to Bavaria that uh sort of corridor from which I’ve been presenting evidence from
Bano up to inbrook to Munich and Beyond up to nurg can we understand in more precise terms attitudes and expectations connected to dancing in that region in the 14th and 15th centuries well one can seek the theory that may have governed the attitudes of intellectuals as well as more General
Audiences by investigating vernacular illuminated Manus manuscripts specifically Middle High German texts in Illustrated books made for upper tier burgers and lower Nobles in the high and late Middle Ages that’s the kind manuscript that house the image that you’re looking at it’s a picture as you can see from the
Rubric about dancing people full intense and Enlighten the manuscript in which this image appears um it has paper leaves and was created inle or nearby after about the year 1450 but the text appearing in this manuscript was not composed in the 15th century that is as was not unusual usual
For medieval books we have verses which were first composed around the year 1300 but which remained popular over the generations being recopied and sometimes as here spiffed up with images the text it itself is known as DEA or the runner or The Courier and it
Was written by one Hugo font TR who was active in the city of bomg at the end of the 13th century in the beginning of the 14th here is an image of The Courier from the opening of that same manuscript now in Munich not exactly an author
Portrait of Hugo but an image of the narrator who speaks in the first person the eye voice throughout the text and the story told by the Rena is a frame narrative wherein this Courier gallops through the land going from Village to village where he hears stories and shares some of his own on
The theme of Vice now Hugo font trimber was not a cleric but he was affiliated with the school attached to the Church of s Gango in bomag and his almost 25,000 line long disquisition in the a text manifests and embellishes upon standard medieval Christian conceptions of sin drawing on Ancient and Theological
Authorities but Hugo’s Middle High German Parables on the sins of Pride greed gluttony unchastity Envy anger and sloth are in a decidedly earthy and often humorous register and the versified text is arranged in Zippy cupets making it engaging to read and hear so what about dancing in De those
Tonson and Len I showed you a bit ago you ask well dancing isn’t much fun without music and so here in a different de manuscript we see a pair of richly costumed fellows each with a sham a conical double read wood woodwind instrument like an OBO this manuscript that I’m showing you
Now is from the same cultural orbit as the Codex I had up a moment ago this one here also localized to the teon region dated to the 14 and likewise on paper the text talks the musicians for puffing away so that their cheeks swell up this one blows here the other blows
There until all their breath is depleted the image on the facing page illustrates the dancing which that music inspires we see a cramped cluster of folks gotten up in the height of fashion the two women in long gowns with extended trains dragging on the ground and the men in tight leggings with short
Jerkens cinched at the waist and here I focus in on that dance vignette the artist evokes the flurry of the cah where men and women Shuffle amongst one another zigzagging around the Dance Floor the man at the right is particularly geared up for the party he wears a broad brimmed headdress open at
The top giving View to a mop of golden locks his legs are encased in Dand ish two-toned hose and his jerkin is trimmed at the bottom with a band enhanced with large beads or Bells this male figure strides to the right breaking out of the frame of the
Image evoking the dynamism of the dance floor but in the accompanying text it is the ladies in attendance who are particularly unbounded Huga trimber places his most extensive consideration of dancing in the section of his Treatise dealing with those who are unchaste Fonda and he observes that maidens step
Onto the dance floor at first very daintily but thereafter they increase their excitement cavorting about as if in a rage who could praise this foolishness he asks in the inorg manuscript I’ve been showing you however the ladies are not depicted leing about far from it they hardly seem to be dancing at
All more Frank about the risks of unrestrained physicality on the dance floor is the rendering illustrating this passage on dancing in a DEA manuscript now at the Morgan library and Museum in New York this codex also is from the choan region and dates to about
1460 it is on paper and is the most richly Illustrated of the 10 10 extent manuscripts that have extended pictorial Cycles on the left you can see the musicians who come in for scorn at the center is a man blasting his bag pipe and to the right is a fellow banging a
Drum as he toots a three hold pipe with gers at the knee adorned with bells he can shake a leg and heighten the cacophony as the party heats up the musicians spr on a crew of dancers who spill across the double page spread the staggered placement of the
Figures evoking the jostle of bodies weaving around a lively Ballroom continuing with my consideration of the accompanying text in Hugo trim’s Reckoning ladies too easily lose themselves with the fun of the Fest how unfortunate Hugo observes that many maidens show more Grace when they are skipping around in dances than
When they are in church the place of prayer and the text goes on to say that should one be so unfortunate as to hear the loud chatter of such maidens when they’re in church one would understand how they distract the poor priests who are just trying to go about their business with the
Mass focusing more closely on the visual the images in the Morgan Library manuscript have a remarkable t tangibility capturing the hustle of the scene through forceful pictorial Style with bold Strokes of the pen the Illuminator articulates strong Contours and uses hatching to formulate Shadows plasticity is enhanced through
An array of washes confidently modulated to create soft highlights at the figures knees shoulders and chests the renderings of these bodies refined by firmly delineated passages of white as evident in the calves of the long-haired fellow in blue and the crisp chaperon framing the face of the lady behind
Him the linearity of this artist’s style and his capacity to maintain a Clarity of form while depicting a cluster of figures advancing and receding in space suggests that he may well have been an engraver or at least was compelled by the graphic dynamism promoted by the new
Medium of intalio print just finding a broad Market in the middle years of the 15th century when this manuscript was made but turning from issues formal back to those iconographic it is over to the left on the facing page the one that with the musicians that we were looking at
Earlier which directly responds to but actually inverts Hugo Fon Trig’s text the deathrun of verses denounce women for getting predatory at the dance such maidens I have seen says Hugo they circulate around or close in on men more than the men Circle them but in the image the artist makes
Plain that the man’s moves are the ones that are aggressive the fellow at the left quaffed with the curly bob of a cordier and wearing the slashed sleeve leaves that were a mark of conspicuous consumption makes a bold grab for the breast of his lady companion she wears a crown typical of
Southern German fos KN finery but she seems to be rather a reluctant party girl she raises her right hand in self-defense and with her left clutches the wrist of her wouldbe groper Hugo Von trim’s text was popular in the generation ations after its composition with most of the 65 extant
Manuscripts of deatha created between 1340 and 1480 in the southern part of the Holy Roman Empire and the 10 Deana manuscripts that are extensively illuminated all date to the 15th century and only one of them is from the region outside of tle so when the Illuminator of this
Image got to work he was given the opportunity to repackage a text that was enjoying a bit of a Vogue and that artist seems to have known something that the author of this text resisted acknowledging that as often as not men are the ones whose liid inous drives and
Need raining in or put another way faced with a text about naughty maidens the Illuminator Winks to his audience scrambling the scenario and emphasizing the aberrance not of the Lassie but of the lad now as I mentioned Hugo trimber was not a cleric and his death on a text was
A sort of Do-it atome digest of broader societal moral codes a look at the sermons of a popular preacher enriches our understanding of these codes but also I note suggests the firmness with which people clung to their vices including the practice of dancing so the preacher whose text
Allows us to explore these issues is belal f Reagan Borg who was active um from about 1240 to 1272 and whose sermons circulated and served as models across Bavaria and Austria to the end of the 15th century here’s an image of Balon Regensburg in a mid-5th century manuscript script now in
Vienna barold is withering in his denouncements of dance condemning it alongside the social ills of murder and thievery and likening Decked Out ladies on the Dance Floor to horses for sale by extension prostitutes but be told also knows his audience he is good at meeting people where they are and he is practical
Recognizing that sacred ideals did not always align with the realities of urban existence this awareness comes across when he deploys a literary conceit injecting in his text a voice of the people unruly objections raised by fictive members of an ordinary audience so for instance in the course
Of a sermon on the Ten Commandments where in observation of the Sabbath nonp activities such as dancing drinking and other Pleasures are denounced a dissenter offers a challenge saying Hey brother barold you sure would have us do absolutely nothing what are we supposed to do with our time on the Sabbath and
When bear told responds telling his listeners that there are plenty of activities with which they can keep themselves busy on a Sunday going to church praying caring for the ill and so forth the fictive Heckler in the crowd bursts out with brother be told say what
You will but we don’t want there not to be dancing the mugat ni of course bold Fon reagens Borg and Hugo V tberg were not the only Christian authorities who objected to dancing nor were they the first nor the last by no means these high medieval authors Drew
On an extensive body of patristic denunciations many of which associated dance with unchristian practices those of the ancient Israelites the idolatrous dance around the golden calf being seen as an earth sin or salom’s tumbling taken to be the quintessence of feminine lasciviousness and treachery or dance being understood as an unsettling
Vestage of ecstatic ancient Greco Roman Cults elements of bold’s admonishments were adopted and Amplified in later sermons and tracts such as one known as bashad and Thomson print that is the harms caused by dancing found in a compendium manuscript from Southern Germany dated to 1437 and here’s a page from the
Manuscript on the screen now and you can see the red underlining of that title about the dangers brought on by dancing in this text one finds the now familiar admonishments for instance warning that dance leads to impure thoughts directing one away from God and the sacraments and the tretis advises
Men not to be ens snared by seductive ladies at a dance party but it is not it is not just participating in a round delay that is hazardous for the soul returning to the concerns of the men of the N rat with which I open this talk
The shot and text frames the whole discussion with an assertion just a few sentences in that even though who Stand By and Watch dancing become Servants of the devil and I put that snippet of text up and bolded the words about onlookers there was a keen awareness
That is of the porosity of the boundary between viewership and participation and like the councilman of nurg who levied fines on performers who spurred men and women to tread onto the Dance Floor showing off perhaps some unseenly new dance means the clerical author of this text seeks
To find a way to Tamp down practices already well in play in city streets here not through taxes but with threats of internal damnation but the clerical minority of society did not speak for all people at all times in the Middle Ages even if their texts are the ones that are best
Preserved or best known by Art historians people had things to contemplate Beyond dwelling always on the ultimate fate of the Soul so to get at late medieval lay attitudes toward the here and now as opposed to the Hereafter I turned to a body of work associated with the vernacular poet naot Fon
Rantal an author who seems to have been active in the Bavarian Austrian region in the first half of the 13th century on the screen is an image of naot from the from the manessa Codex of Circa 1304 the dainty rendering of the central figure here is absolutely at odds with
The blunt and body tone of the tales attributed to the poet there are a whopping 150 Middle High German songs or L given to naod many of them composed in the 14th and 15th centuries in the spirit of naot though not by the original poet himself so naot songs
Become a veritable genre crowd-pleasing and fashionable in the southern part of the Holy Roman Empire at the end of the Middle Ages and dancing features as a key theme running throughout those works now as an art historian I must admit that I find it disappointing that there is not a rich tradition of
Illuminated manuscripts illustrating naid Do’s Tal there are however some lowquality woodcut images augmenting the earliest surviving printed nid compendium published in alborg in 1495 one of which you see here and I can share images from this incal as I give you a taste of the way in which dance figures in the
Songs multiple Night Out lyrics are structured as dialogues between mothers and daughters often with a muta like that shown here on the right trying to dissuade the Tor here the maiden who’s with the Loose Hair on the left from going to a dance the mothers warn that
Such events at such events young ladies lose their in additions and circulate among men and that all too often the girls end up pregnant the joke consistently is that the daughters do not heed their mothers and indeed this young lady here seems already to know all about how things go down at the
Dance the inscription the inscription indicates that the girl’s nether region is on fire or is smoking and that therefore she needs a man it seems that a later viewer of that woodcut on the right intervened perhaps seeking to protect the modesty of the maiden by inking over work her groin the
Result however has the appearance of pubic hair or perhaps the smoke or Ral referenced in the caption now I noted that there does not appear to have been a developed tradition of illuminated manuscripts featuring not’s texts but it does seem to have been common for the domestic
Abodes of lay people and for taverns to have frescoed walls dedicated to naid themes as you might expect such Works were not preserved well over the centuries they were not in the Palaces of nobility or in in ecclesiastical spaces they were part of the furniture so to speak often
In urban Mansions of high ranking burgers and they usually were plastered over in the post-medieval era I’m showing you remains of such frescos uncovered in recent decades in Vienna and Zurich both in the homes I note of Jewish businessmen the paintings contribute to evidence of Jewish participation in the
Social and cultural life of late medieval European cities which is a fascinating Topic in its own right but I use these frescos to exemplify a fashion for naod paintings in domestic spaces more broadly since they are among the best surviving examples now that said the paintings
Have lost a good deal of detail but one can make out that there are figures dancing in a chain in both ensembles and in the fragment on the right at Zurich I think it is easy to see a musician in red blasting a horn at the right
Edge it seems that these were just the kinds of images that raised the ranker of churchmen as exemplified in a rebuke from one Nicholas Ruta a university Master active Circa 15 1800 up in Roso so Northern Germany who laments that lay people instead of adorning their walls with renderings of Apostles prefer to
Paint scenes of the naida dance or other naked and unchastened their breasts and I have that text now on the screen with the references to the night out dance and to the bare breasts in bold so um I’m afraid I don’t have any render ings of topless mermaids to share
But I can show you some images of a so-called night o dance that is better preserved than those examples from Vienna and Zurich this is a mural in a building in Reagan sporg a Bavarian City about a two days walk from Munich and a Trade Center
On the danu river linked by roads to nberg to the north and insbrook to the South here on the left you can see a photo of one corner of the first FL door of the building at Glen Gosa 14 in Reagan sporg with a fresco at the left
Showing an array of people clasping hands in a chain dance and at the right I’ve given you a detail of a bagpi player and here um closer in is a section of that chain dance with participants arranged boy girl boy girl holding hands and moving toward the
Viewers left with sorry to say a big patch at the center only faintly visible the names inscribed above some of the figures tether the dep depictions to the scenarios and characters found in nid lyrics and there are details of the Ensemble that make Vivid the Fashions of
The day and bring us back to themes found in Hugo font Tren the lady at the center of this shot wears a decorous green gown narrow with the waist and trailing on the ground as was Alam mode in the 14th century but a female figure off to the
Left which you can see here if you strain your eyes wears the kind of get up that might Quicken the pulse of a dance partner on top she wears a drapy sir coat Demir in its coverage but with her left hand she reaches back bending her elbow to reveal an armhole cut so
Low that it reveals her slender midriff and scon in a clingy gown this feature was called the toyful fener or Devil’s window and it was denounced by moralists so here is another iconographic element recalling the Notions also found in texts linking dancing to the sensuality of
Women now the images on which I’ve been focusing mostly don’t look much like dancing per se sure we see men and women decked out for the party and mingling in the company of musicians but most seem to sway or shuffle along at best not so however the
Guy next to our well-dressed lady he is downright buoyant and here I faded out the lady to make more uh legible the fellow in question though admittedly there are extensive passages of loss in the Fresco one can see that his knees are bent and his feet spring from the ground we get a
Sense of lively movement the bouncing rry of the dance and we’ve seen this kind of springing before just not in a depiction of characters taking part in a festive dance party but rather in images that evoke performances images that I introduced at the opening of this talk
Side by side one can see how the painted figure here mirrors the movements of the sculpted one now on the right caught mid motion crouching to LEAP upward with the force of his Ben right leg the Fresco image dates to about 1360 or 70 and the sculpture is from about a century later
And together for us they suggest the energy and even Foot Loose excitement of viewing and participating in dance now that sculpture is one of a series of dancers there are 10 in all and I’m showing you four of them each shot from two Vantage points these figures were created around the year 14
80 they were carved from lynen wood and painted in the workshop of the most celebrated sculptor of Bavaria at the time arasmus graa the dynamism of the figures is hard to miss focusing in here now this figure holds his balance on his bent right leg while his left strains in
A sharp diagonal having moved in that direction with such force that the golden cloth tied below his knee flutters the figure’s arm juts off to the right the thrust of the wrist rhyming visually with the acutely angled alignment of the right ankle the dancer bends sharply at the
Waist his whole body positioned like a hinge poised to Spring open this dancer swivels his head sharply over his left shoulder casting his bright eyed gaze toward the viewer his hips meanwhile shift back in the opposite direction creating a compressed coiled torsion in the figure as a whole tense extended fingers vibrate with
Energy captured in material form in the billowing gold of the dancer’s dublet and drapy turban now a compelling element of this cluster of sculpted dancers from Munich is that one of them is painted to appear as if he is of African descent the polychrome on the Munich dancers was refreshed in a 1928
Restoration and so this figure’s intensely dark skin tone perforce was inflected by 19th and early 20th century racist attitudes connected to minstral se worth inquiry I think is the connection between such renderings and the medieval and modern enthusiasm for black face especially at fosnot though these issues are beyond the scope of my
Discussion here but I do want to take a moment to explain the implications of the convention of calling the figures in Munich moresca or Morris dancers as you may have already noticed in U my caption a couple of slides back there was a period of about half a
Century between 1450 and 1500 in the German speaking realm when images of energetic male dancers appeared in a range of artistic and textual media and references to them surface frequently in administrative records of cities and courts the nomenclature used today for these figures is found in such 15th
Century texts and even in the account books of the Munich comma recording payment to the artist arasmus graa for a suite of pin morisa town or images of moresca ansers and I’ve put that snippet of text up on the screen now that standard translation moresca derives from the word more and
Variance employed in the late Middle Ages to refer variously to people from Africa people of Muslim faith or people of non-european or non-Christian identities in general often used interchangeably with the equally vague term Saras early scholarship speculated that the Dynamic dance moves modeled in the Munich figures originated in North
Africa and Spain and then caught on in France and England and Germany and elsewhere justifying a nomenclature marking the the choreography as morish these days historians of dance dismiss such explications as simplistically causal and essentializing though no one has offered an alternate term for the mode of performance it does appear evident that
With flowing hair fluttering scarves jingling bells and the like these figures do operate in a register outside of the everyday for white Christian Europeans moments of spectacle and rry and although it is a loaded and imprecise term because it is the standard one used I will refer to such performers as moresa
Dancers now it’s hard to tell from the photos I’ve been showing you but the Munich moresa dancers are rather small with the most upright ones measuring about 80 cm in height and they were not created to be seen in isolation as they were photographed in these pictures
Rather they were part of a larger decorative Ensemble ornamenting the ceremonial Hall of the Munich Roth house this 1936 photo captures their original installation with the dancers as one element in a decorative band of shields with Coats of Arms running at the top perimeter of the walls you can see the
Moresa dancer at the center up on a little console highlighted by my upright blue oval and then an array of armorials on either side and here’s a 16th century rendering of the whole space with little blue ovals that I’ve popped in marking the spots of the moresa dancer
Sculptures as you can see they were inserted at regular intervals punctuating a row of Shields and that Row in total had some 100 Coats of Arms referencing the Empire and its political allies so here are a few of those armorials alongside some of the Munich moresa dancers this stros of dancers
With symbols of political Authority brings me back to issues raised at the outset of this talk because here we are at a r house a town hall this time in Munich not in nurg and this selection of motifs moresa dancers with armorials makes quite palpable a tension at the
End of the 15th century between a popular Zeal for freewheeling dance moves and the political imperative to regulate the temporal realm people were eager Spectators for this new dance form and in some way as suggested by the texts I shared at the opening of this talk these viewers were
Getting in on the action themselves churchmen taught that such rry only could lead to trouble with ladies misbehaving and destabilizing a social structure putatively governed by a fear of damnation but we know that the drive to dance was not fully suppressed because indeed there was a whole written and
Pictorial Culture exemplified by The Works connected to N Out attesting to the irrepressible of dancing so maybe the deployment of dancers and images of Civic order at Munich was a case of if you can’t beat them coopt them dance was a part of social life like it or not might as well
Concede that and show it as something that could be harnessed by the state but moresa dancing could not be fully appropriated by those in power no matter what might be suggested by an officially sponsored image program by the late 15th century the recently developed medium of intalio print made possible to an unprecedented
Degree intimate engagement with minutely rendered images within the domestic sphere the graphic delicacy of Engravings and dry points allowed artists to render fictive worlds with a pictorial tangibility that invited viewers to imagine themselves into idealized or satirical scenarios to enter an arena where the regulations of the city rot had little
Bearing this engraving of moresca dancers both furnishes its viewer with a vision of the dance craze of the day and models the fun of blurring the boundary between spectacle and spectator the work is by Israel Fon mechum a remarkably prolific artist who trained in Southwestern Germany in the mid-1 15
Century in the image the round format used enhances the sense of the whirling movement of Leaping men accompanied by a Jester and a musician and circling a woman who holds a loft a ring a prize to be awarded to the performer she finds most pleasing as suggested in related
Texts the audience ience depicted at the back of the space rendered here find it hard to stay on the sidelines they reach through the window at the back pushing to get closer or perhaps to enter the fun themselves they may have been excited by the getups of the dancers which are
Similar to those of the Munich moresa dancers and of the men in the Morgan Library de manuscript I discussed earlier lay literature gives voice to the desires that could be ignited by men dressed in tight pants with short jackets German epic poets speak of men’s leggings that appear to be painted or
Glued on as in the quotes on the screen and Impossible V from Fon ebach describes a lad dressed in Scarlet hose and exclaims goodness how beautiful his legs were little surprised to find this evidence suggesting that it was not just ladies decked out for festive occasions who aroused feelings of lust we can
Imagine that the men’s costumes that we see here snug leggings with short jerk and showing off a shapely rear could be enticing for many onlookers tempting folks of all kinds onto the Dance Floor another sculpted decorative Ensemble similarly integrates a prizegiving lady with male moresa dancers this is a three tiered Loda in
Insbrook affixed to the Noah Hof at the center of the city it is known as the golden estle or golden roof named for the roughly 2500 guilt copper shingles crowning the structure it was built between 1497 and 1500 and its upper paret is adorned with reliefs by the artist Nicholas Turing
Showcasing moresa Dan answers you see a a few of these sculpted panels you saw a few of these sculpted panels already at the opening of my paper and now in these details you can get a PO sense of the program where the dancers Spin and bend and leap and
Pairs flanking renderings of the emperor maximilan with two ladies perhaps his successive wives Mary of burgundy and Bianca sporza and you see the emperor in profile in the relief at the center the insertion of an image of the Sovereign with moresca dancers Echoes the combination of motifs we saw at the
Munich rth house but here the focus is more on maximillian’s legendary enthusiasm for Festive Celebrations than on political Authority and now I note that the iconography of the goldenness dle overall is complicated having perplexed generations of Scholars not least the many who have have toiled to this day
Unsuccessfully to unlock the meaning of the puzzling text in the banners fluttering across the reliefs many of the particularities and nuances of the pictorial program of the gold duffle are secondary for us here however and I remain focused on the way in which Nicholas touring’s reliefs manifest aspects of and attitudes connected to
The dance Trends we’ve been exploring now many have observed a parallel between the array of characters at the goldenness Dole and the Israel fun mechanim print that I already showed you the gyrating moresa dancers aiming to win the favor of a lady holding a
Ring or an apple as a prize and now I’ve brought that print back and zoomed in on the sculpted image of the lady next to maximilan holding an orb and I’m showing you now some other selections from touring’s relief cycle of moresca dancers and details that I showed you
Already at the opening so in principle the lady with the orb is the focus but the dancers sometimes seem to be rather engaged with one another I call attention to that hand position of the dancer on the right the move itself a cupping gesture aimed toward the nether regions of his partner
Begs consideration in comparison to that man getting handsy on the Dance Floor that we saw in the Morgan Library manuscript of Deena while Hugo V trimber moralizing text blames women for heating things up on the Dance Floor perhaps triggering a man to lose control and make a play in
The goldenness Dole reliefs we can see a keen awareness that fit male bodies leaping and shaking it also could arous Lusty actions and in this case the fellow who is the object of Desire does not seemed to be put off by the Overture we can see men and women
Together delighting in the kind of arousal ignited by a freewheeling dance in this drawing from the so-called medieval House book a manuscript created sometime after 1482 perhaps in the Ryland and which was in insbrook in the 16th century the image is complicated featuring some 25 small figures engaged
In distinct vignettes so let me walk you through it at the top is Venus riding an armored Steed this page is one among seven presenting the children of the planets and thus on other Pages we see Mercury Saturn Jupiter and so on similarly celebrated as guiding forces determining the character and
Inclinations of those born under their sign Venus’s children like dancing and can ning in the lower right are four male and female pairs Dancing In A procession sashing to the notes sounded by nearby trumpeters and a hery Gertie in the middle ground at the left are two youths busting out some moresa
Dancing moves spurred on by a standing musician all the music making and dancing gets to be a lot and before we know it a couple has scooted off from the party to get busy in the bushes and if there was any doubt about what might be happening with all that
Amorous grasping in the right middle ground in the lower left we get a clear view of a man and a woman who have stripped off their clothes and are happily taking a bath together the verses on the facing page of this image celebrate the connection between dancing and diance and are
Notably free from the misogynistic tone found in other texts I’ve shared this evening so now on the screen I add in a shot of that text Page and a transcription of key lines of the Middle High German verses that accompany the children of Venus image the lines read in Translation
Plucking Harps and loots singing and strumming the children of Venus enjoy the music and also play well organs flutes and trombones dancing necking kissing and Whispering on Hill un Raman and the text concludes with beholden always to things unchaste and to love making thus are Venus’s children for all
Time a note in the curatorial file for the Morgan libraryies DEA manuscript observes that there are stylistic affinities between the illuminations in that codex and the Productions of the House book master both artists working in pen and ink in the second half of the 15th century and this comparison of that
Lower right corner from the children of Venus image from the house book does Echo some elements of the Morgan illumination the pointed chins and rounded jawlines of some figures the mincing ankles and shapely calves of the men the heavy Fabric and crunchy folds of the women’s gowns though admittedly
Those are all elements characteristic of the graphic arts in general from The Middle and the Bavarian Austrian regions around 1460 to 80 but I’m intrigued by that suggestion of an alignment of the graphic style of the House book master and the images in the Morgan de
Manuscript and there is no doubt about a connection between the house bookm and Israel fun mechanim the engraver I discussed earlier Israel fund mechm was both an innovator and a copyist Who reworked compositions by his forebears and contemporaries including designs by the housebook master both of these artists
Experimented with intalo at a time when this medium made newly possible in Europe the replication of minutely rendered designs featuring Innovative themes these compositions could depart from the standardized iconographies of saints and Christ’s passion and other devotional motiv Chiefs that dominated the earliest Productions in the print
Medium and rather offered up new subject matter to spark the interest of urban consumers from the burger ranks presenting scenes that spoke to daily interests and diversions and now again I show you that round engraving with moresa dancers and a lady as well as another print by
Israel fun mechanism on the right one that nests moresa dancers and a central fry line into a strip of ornament in these examples Israel fund mechanism seems to capitalize on the dance CRA of the moment creating images to meet the tastes of consumers excited by the spectacle and even the suspense
Of a moresa performance and I note that these Works apparently were popular since to this day they survived in large numbers with some 45 known extent impressions of the round print on the left and roughly 80 for the strip of ornament on the right the men dance wildly shaking their
Booties bending and twisting and lunging while at the center a lady ever demure and the embodiment of chill holds a loft a ring or the Apple she will profer to her favorite dancer the ladies there don’t seem to mind their roles as judge in So You Think You Can Dance moresa
Edition but here this lady is so over it this image is one in a sequence of 12 Engravings by Israel fun mechm showing couples each with a man and woman sometimes antagonizing one another sometimes cuddling up or sometimes as here perhaps tolerating one another the woman is marked clearly as a
House FR by the cluster of keys and household utensils hanging from her belt but her companion is not keen to stay in for the Comforts of an early Deadtime he is dressed for a party looking something like a morasa dancer himself with tight hose and short jerkin
Though he is so eager to hop about as he tries to balance a Double Cup on his forehead that he hasn’t taken the time to tie up the laces of his booties and his money purses strewn on the floor two blank band lals undulate in a lively tangle evoking the moves of
Around Alay on the dance floor and together creating a heso shaped Arch over the pair the cluster of ribbon at the center of fixing the two squirrels together marks the woman and man as a couple tied to one another so the man is shown as energized and perhaps foolish while the woman
Seems resigned to her partnership but not necessarily ready to join in on her husband’s rivalry and perhaps for a lady like this it was worth thinking twice before stepping out for a jig the denunciations of a Hugo font triberg or a baral f Reagan Board Cat castigating female libidinousness on the
Dance Floor might be hard to shake off maybe better to be a Wallflower than scorned as a harlot one might conclude but moralists do not always get the last word sometimes when the musicians got into a Groove when men in tight hose began to get down even a jaded or
Overworked Lady of the house could Embrace an opportunity for fun accepting an invitation onto the Dance Floor busting out some new dance moves whatever the Elders of the city Ro may have thought that is the loudest voices that survive from the Middle Ages of course
Were those of the men in power they may have sought to control the when and the how of urban mart but they don’t always get to dictate how we understand human experience of the past images in print a medium typically understood by Art historians to Herald secular possibilities of the early
Modern age can Inspire re-evaluation of works from prior Generations with a closer examination of some overlooked images and a little imagination we can be sure that there were times when the ladies of the house were glad to get out on the floor and dance the night away thank you