Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture Vol 5, No 1 “Agency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DOI 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu Photographs of the “Dust of the Highway” Georgiana Goddard King’s Way of Saint James Annemarie Iker Abstract This article explores the use of photography in American art historian Georgiana Goddard King’s The Way of Saint James (1920). King’s genre-defying book on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage intertwines art historical insights with literary commentary, historical examinations, geographical observations, and travelogue. But despite King’s rich, groundbreaking scholarship on medieval Spain in The Way of Saint James and other monographs, her legacy has been overshadowed by subsequent art historians, chief among them her peer Arthur Kingsley Porter. Here, it is suggested that King’s emphasis in The Way of Saint James on personal experiences of pilgrimage—both historical and contemporary — diminished the value of her work in the eyes of her colleagues, particularly when compared with Porter’s supposedly objective studies. These differences in approach to the C amino de Santiago, visually manifest in King’s and Porter’s respective deployment of photographic evidence, have implications for medieval, historiographic, and feminist art historical inquiries. About the Author Annemarie Iker is a doctoral student in the Department of Art and Archeology at Pr inceton University. She received her MA in Art History from Williams College. Her research focuses on artistic and scholarly connections between southern Europe, northern Europe, and the Americas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and she has a special interest in the historiography of Spanish medieval art. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 Following the mysterious disappearance of art historian Arthur Kingsley Porter from the coast of Donegal, Ireland in 1933, his former doctoral student Kenneth Conant mourned the loss of “one of the truly great medievalists of our time.”1 Conant, by then a professor of architecture at Harvard University, credited Porter (b. Stamford, CT, 1883; d. Inishbofin, Ireland 1933) with challenging the regional classifications governing the study of early medieval art and architecture. Through monographs like Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads (1923) and Spanish Romanesque Sculpture (1928), Porter expounded a model of stylistic development and transmission facilitated by the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, in the Spanish province of Galicia. “Of enduring value,” Conant noted, “was his new emphasis on the importance of Spain.”2 While Porter is remembered today as an—if not the—American leader in the study of Spanish medieval art and architecture, the Iberian Peninsula was hardly “new” to Georgiana Goddard King (b, West Columbia, WV, 1871; d. Los Angeles, CA, 1939), founding chair of the department of art history at Bryn Mawr College (fig. 1).3 A path-breaking art histor ian, King taught the first graduate courses on Spanish art in the United States and produced scholarship of noted breadth, depth, and ingenuity. King’s intellectual commitment to the Iberian Peninsula long predates the 1923 publication of Porter’s Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads. By 1923, King had already released an annotated edition of George Edmund Street’s Gothic Architecture in Spain (1914); a scholarly re-issue of Street’s writing, George Edmund Street, Unpublished Notes and Republished Papers (1916); A Brief Account of the Military Orders in Spain (1921); and a three-volume text on the Camino de Santiago, The Way of Saint James (1920).4 In addition to these book-length studies, King, also prior to 1923, had published numerous articles on Spanish castles, cloisters, and churches in the most distinguished 1 Kenneth Conant, “Arthur Kingsley Porter,” Speculum 9 (1934): 95. 2 Ibid. 3 Scholars began to revisit King’s legacy at the turn of the twenty-first century. See Madeline H. Caviness, “Seeking Modernity Through the Romanesque: G.G. King and E.H. Lowber Behind a Camera in Spain c. 1910-25,” Journal of Art Historiography 11 (2014): 1-30; Alba del Pozo García, “Una pionera de hispanismo: Georgiana Goddard King (1871-1939),” Informes USA 14 (2013); Ana Hernández, “Georgiana Goddard King (1871-1939), pionera de la Historia del Arte medieval en Galicia,” in As mulleres na Historia de Galicia. Actas do I Encontro Interdisciplinar de Historia de Xénero , ed. Miguel García-Fernández, Silvia Cernadas Martínez, Aurora Ballesteros (Santiago de Compostela: Andavira, 2012), compact disc; Hernández, “Saint Mary of Melón por Georgiana Goddard King,” Quintana 7 (2008): 203-207; Janice Mann, “‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’: Here’s to Georgiana Goddard King (1871-1939)” in Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 111-126; Mann, “Georgiana Goddard King and A. Kingsley Porter Discover the Art of Medieval Spain,” in Spain in America, ed. Richard L. Kagan (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 171-192; and Susanna Terrell Saunders, “Georgiana Goddard King (1871-1939): Educator and Pioneer in Medieval Spanish Art” in Women as Interpreters of the Visual Arts, 1820-1979, ed. Claire Richter Sherman and Adele M. Holcomb (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 209-238. 4 Note that King appears to have largely completed The Way of Saint James in 1917 when she submitted the manuscript to her editors. She further edited the manuscript in 1919 while in Spain. See Caviness, “Seeking Modernity Through the Romanesque,” 18. Photographs of the “Dust of the Highway” Georgiana Goddard King’s Way of Saint James Annemarie Iker http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 2 9 A n n e m a r ie I k e r C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 academic journals in the United States.5 As her Bryn Mawr colleague Harold Wethey would observe in King’s obituary, American art historical scholarship on Spain f lourished under Porter and his followers. But if Porter came to overshadow King in her lifetime, and eventually, to eclipse her entirely, it was not always so: “The American pioneer in this r ich field was a woman,” wrote Wethey, “Professor Georgiana Goddard King.”6 Figure 1 Unidentified photographer, Professor Georgiana Goddard King at Bryn Mawr College, c . 1910. Spec ial Collections, Bryn Mawr C ollege Library, Bryn Mawr, PA. C ourtesy Special Collections, Bryn Mawr C ollege Library. King’s obscurity relative to Porter, ironically, may be attributed to her best-known book, The Way of Saint James. Across three illustrated volumes, King explores the monuments and traditions of the Camino de Santiago. Early reviewers noted that The Way of Saint James interlaces art history with literature, history, archeology, folklore, geography, and travelogue, forming King’s “own personal genre.”7 The resulting weave is thick , with each strand maintaining its apartness. The close formal analysis of monasteries, churches, and cathedrals along the Camino de Santiago lies beside the recounting of long-ago battles, recitation of archaic poems, description of landscapes, and even reports of the author’s present-day dealings with her fellow pilgrims. Indeed, King acknowledges in the introduction 5 Among early articles published by King are: “Three Unknown Churches in Spain,” American Journal of Archaeology 22 (1918): 154-165; “Spanish Cloisters,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects 7 (1919): 481-8; “Castles in Spain,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects 10 (1921): 377-382; and “Some Churches in Galicia,” Art Studies 1 (1923): 55-64. In 1923—the same year as the publication of Porter’s Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads—she published Sardinian Painting (New York: Longmans, Green and Co.); the following year, the long-researched Pre-Romanesque Churches of Spain (New York: Longmans, Green and Co.); and in 1927, Mudéjar. In 1941, her Heart of Spain, a collection of essays edited by Agnes Mongan, was published posthumously. 6 Harold E. Wethey, “An American Pioneer in Hispanic Studies: Georgiana Goddard King,” Parnassus 11 (1939): 33. 7 Ibid. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 3 0 P h o to g r a p hs o f th e “D u s t o f th e H i g h w a y ” C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 to The Way of Saint James that the aim of her project shifted considerably from start to finish: The intention, as the reader will see, has grown long since from a mere pedantic exercise in architecture, to a very pilgrimage, to following ardently along the ancient way where all the centuries have gone.8 Over the course of The Way of Saint James, King forgoes “mere pedantic exercise[s] in architecture” for evocation, and impartiality for ardor.9 Most significantly, she grants the same attentiveness to sensory apprehension and shifting internal states as she does to art and architecture. Choir screens, vaults, and tympana yield often to the chronicling o f experience—to, as King intended, the “very pilgrimage” itself. King, in The Way of Saint James, and Porter, in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, trace the same pilgrimage road. Nonetheless, their scholarship diverges sharply in focus, perspective, and tone. Porter himself broached this divergence in a review of his student Conant’s Early Architectural History of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela (1926). Surveying the existing literature on the cathedral, Porter writes, Miss King [in The Way of Saint James], while bringing much new light had her hands far too full with the vast subject of the pilgrimage roads to be able to undertake the thousands of patient measurements, the conscientious checking up of results, the stone-for-stone study of the building required for an architectural monograph.10 Implicitly, Porter aligns himself with the “patient” and “conscientious” “stone -for-stone study” practiced by his student, Conant—the very approach labeled “mere pedant[ry]” by King.11 The self-consciously differing objectives and methods of the art historian as envisioned by King and Porter, then, are readily apparent in their respective writing. But as distinctive as each medievalist’s prose, I suggest, is his or her mobilization of visual evidence. Though King, like Porter, engaged deeply with images and objects, her own production of images and objects—namely, photographs and illustrated scholarly publications—has received less attention.12 Here, this topic is addressed through photographs featured by King in The Way of Saint James. I propose that these photographs deserve 8 Georgiana Goddard King, The Way of Saint James, 3 vols. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920), 1:23. 9 Ibid. 10 Arthur Kingsley Porter, “Santiago Again,” Art in America and Elsewhere (February 1927): 5-6. 11 Conant wrote a fond review of King’s Heart of Spain (1941), a book published two years after her death. In the review, he praises King’s “flashing mind, her keen artistic judgment, and her warm appreciative intelligence” and calls her “one of the choicest critics among American critics, historians, and teachers of medieval art.” See Conant, “Heart of Spain [review],” The Art Bulletin 24 (1942): 110. 12 There are important exceptions, however. On the topic of King’s usage of photography, see Caviness, “Seeking Modernity Through the Romanesque.” For more on Porter’s usage of photography—better documented than King’s, like his career at large—see Christopher R. Lakey, “Contingencies of Display: Benjamin, Photography, and Imagining the Medieval Past,” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 7 (2016): 86-87; Kathryn Brush, “Imag(in)ing Medieval Stones: Arthur Kingsley Porter, Photography, and the Study of Romanesque Sculpture after World War I” (paper presented at “Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History,” Part III, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, New York City, March 25-6, 2011); Friedrich Kestel, “The Arthur Kingsley Porter Collection of Photography and the European Preservation of Monuments,” Visual Resources 9 (1994): 361-381; and James Ackerman, “The Visual Arts Collections: Manifold Resources,” in The Invention of Photography and Its Impact on Learning: Photographs from Harvard University and Radcliffe College and from the Collection of Harrison D. Horblit, ed. Louise Todd Ambler and Melissa Banta (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Library, 1989), 62-71. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 3 1 A n n e m a r ie I k e r C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 careful consideration as interpretive tools working in tandem with the text around them. Moreover, I believe that they are contrasted productively with photographs featured by Porter in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads. For it is through examination of King and Porter’s treatment of the same subject, the Camino de Santiago, that differences in their scholarship emerge most starkly. These differences can be observed at once v isually and textually: while the photographs included by Porter in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads demonstrate his commitment to what he termed “stone-for-stone study,” those included by King in The Way of Saint James, by contrast, reveal her stated intention to approximate, in book form, a “very pilgrimage.” To be sure, King and Porter alike were precocious in their early adoption of photography. Both learned to photograph to aid their research, and both included reproductions of photographs by themselves, family, friends, and commercial photographers in their various publications. Nonetheless, photographs included in their monographs on the Camino de Santiago betray fundamentally dissimilar conceptions of the practice of art history —and, I argue, shed light on the reasons for Porter’s enduring luster and King’s eventual anonymity. First, though, it merits emphasis that I discuss neither King nor Porter as a photographer. Rather, I focus on King’s strategic use of photographic illustrations in The Way of Saint James, and arrive at new insights by comparing her approach toward il lustrations with that of Porter in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads. In part, my motives are practical: while Porter attributes photographs to himself, to his wife, and to commercial photographers, King, unfortunately, does not specify the source of her photographs and photogravures.13 Recent scholarship by Madeline Caviness indicates that many were purchased from commercial photographers.14 Given the range of photographic authorship in Porter’s volumes and the remaining uncertainty regarding attribution in King’s, I do not stress the identity of those behind the camera. Instead, I foreground the rhetorical deployment of photographs as art historical evidence by King—evidence in support of a history of art, perhaps, less familiar to us today than that presented by Porter. Santiago de Compostela: Two Views of the Puerta de las Platerías One of the few sites along the Camino de Santiago documented visual ly in both King’s Way of Saint James and Porter’s Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads is its culmination, the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.15 Santiago emerged as a pilgr image destination for European Christians in the ninth century, nearly a thousand years after the 13 In Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, Porter includes photographs attributed to himself (“A.K.P.”), to his wife (“L.W.P.”), and to professional photographers whose images he purchased. Featured in this paper are photographs Porter attributes to the Barcelona-based photographer Roselló Mas and the Madrid-based photographer J. Roig. See Porter, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads (Boston: Marshall Jones Company, 1923), 1:357. 14 As Caviness writes in “Seeking Modernity Through the Romanesque,” both King and her partner and travel companion, Edith Lowber, were active, accomplished photographers. Even so, most of the photographs featured in The Way of Saint James appear to have been purchased from commercial photographers or engraved after photographs already published, indicates Caviness (19). To further complicate matters, few of the many photographic negatives or prints deposited by King and Lowber at Bryn Mawr College and at the Hispanic Society of America can be decisively attributed to either woman. Caviness, quoting Patrick Lenaghan, curator of photography at the Hispanic Society, suggests that these negatives and prints, some of which went on to appear in King’s books, all be labeled “photos from the King-Lowber expeditions.” See Caviness, “Seeking Modernity Through the Romanesque,” 6. 15 For many historical and contemporary pilgrims, the Camino de Santiago has concluded at the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Other pilgrims, however, have continued beyond the cathedral to finisterre, a peninsula on the west coast of Spain whose name comes from the Latin finis terrae, “end of the earth.” http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 3 2 P h o to g r a p hs o f th e “D u s t o f th e H i g h w a y ” C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 remains of Saint James—an early apostle of Christ, who purportedly preached the gospel in Spain, and was martyred in Jerusalem—were said to have appeared miraculously off the coast of Galicia.16 By 896 a modest church containing Saint James’ tomb began to attract small numbers of pilgrims.17 So began the practice of journeying overland or by sea to the remote northwestern corner of Spain, a practice King calls “hugeous, incredible.”18 Even Porter, a more restrained writer, professes that the “actuality of the pilgrimage, like a cosmic phenomenon, overwhelms with the sense of its force, its inevitability.”19 As more recent scholarship has stressed, though, there was nothing “inevitable” about Santiago’s rise to the ranks of longstanding Christian pilgrimage destinations like Jerusalem and Rome. The construction of the present cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, begun in 1078 under the lea dership of Alfonso VI, King of Castilla, León, and Galicia, and the local bishop, Diego Peláez, serves as a particularly dramatic example of the promotion of pilgrimage by interested parties.20 For scholars of early medieval art and architecture, the cathedral’s southern entrance, the Puerta de las Platerías (Silversmiths’ Portal), holds particular interest as it appears to be the structure’s only remaining Romanesque façade.21 Porter, significantly, includes eighteen 16 For an account of the myth and life of Saint James in relation to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, see Kenneth Conant, The Early Architectural History of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926), 4. For a contemporary perspective on the cathedral, its origins, and its traditions, see José-Luis Senra, En el principio: Génesis de la Catedral Románica de Santiago de Compostela. Contexto, construcción y programa iconográfico (Santiago de Compostela: Teófilo Edicións, 2014). 17 According to Conant, a new church built around Saint James’ tomb was begun under the leadership of King Alfonso III (king of Asturias, León, and Galicia) and Bishop Sisnando Menéndez in 879, completed in 896, and dedicated in 899 (Conant, Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, 6). More recent scholarship has emphasized the role of eleventh-century bishop Diego Peláez in nurturing the cult of Saint James and conceiving the present cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. See for instance Senra, Génesis de la Catedral Románica de Santiago de Compostela. 18 King, The Way of Saint James, 1:25. 19 Porter, Romanesque Sculpture, 1:171. 20 The construction of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela had firmly established religious, political, and financial motivations. Karen Rose Mathews in “Reading Romanesque Sculpture: the Iconography of the South Portal Sculpture at Santiago de Compostela” (Gesta 39 [2000]: 3-12) addresses the role of local archbishop Diego Gelmírez in commissioning the Puerta de las Platerías and shaping its vision of ecclesiastical might. Mathews situates the construction of this south portal in a moment of tension between Gelmírez, and townspeople and lay leaders. Likewise, Barbara Abou-El-Haj explores the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela as an expression of Gelmírez’s political ambitions in “Santiago de Compostela in the Time of Diego Gelmírez,” Gesta 36 (1997): 165-179. Additionally, Christabel Watson re-dates significant portions of the western facade and interior—long attributed to a single “Master Mateo”—to the tenure of Gelmírez, expanding his already considerable importance to the early development of the pilgrimage to Santiago. See Watson, “A Reassessment of the Western Parts of the Romanesque Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 59 (2000): 505-521. 21 M.F. Hearn writes, “all that remains of three great façade ensembles [at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela] is to be found on the south transept façade, known as Puerta de las Platerías” (142). He suggests that the portal has undergone at least six major renovations since the twelfth century, leaving the portal program a “meaningless jumble.” M.F. Hearn, Romanesque Sculpture: The Revival of Monumental Stone Sculpture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1981), 145. Porter also considered the portal a puzzle: “No order is traceable in the composition as a whole. Little statues, big statues, pieces of statues are walled in helter-skelter” (212). He proposed that two major renovations have occurred. See Porter, Romanesque Sculpture, 212. More recently, Claudia Rückert has argued that one discrete sculptural element on the Puerta de las Platerías, the so-called “Woman with the Skull,” sheds light on the architectural transformations undergone by this southern portal. According to Rückert, the sculpture originally appeared on the Romanesque northern portal, destroyed in the eighteenth century, and was subsequently integrated into the southern portal. This move, she writes, was one of many reconstructions during the medieval, early modern, and modern periods, leading to the portal’s “disturbed appearance.” Rückert, “A Reconsideration of the Woman with the Skull on the Puerta de las Platerías of Santiago de Compostela Cathedral,” Gesta 51 (2012): 130. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 3 3 A n n e m a r ie I k e r C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 photographs of the Puerta de las Platerías alone in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgr image Roads. The first plate, captioned Puerta de las Platerías, relief in western buttress. A ferocious lion, depicts its subject in great detail (fig. 2). With its head swive led toward the viewer, a sculpted lion strides forward intently along its stone backdrop and casts a menacing glance to the right. The lion’s muscled haunches and blocky head project from the façade with force, while the pocked granite makes its hollowed eyes seem wild and its hide mangy. Figure 2 J. Roig, Puerta de las Platerías , relief in wes tern buttress . A ferocious Lion, from A rthur Kings ley P orter, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads , vol. 6 , Castile, As turias , Galicia (Bos ton: Marshall Jones C ompany, 1923), plate 674 (photo: author). But in relation to the decorated portion of the façade at large, this beast is marginal, even diminutive. The lion slinks atop a stringcourse to the left of the portal, peripheral to the elaborate figurative sculpture extending across the tympana, spandrel, and jambs (fig. 3). Indeed, the photograph itself supplies much of the menace. The tight focus and oblique angle used by the photographer, for example, amplify the lion’s size and accentuate its heft.22 The creature in A ferocious lion appears ready to pounce out of its frame: its toenails nearly scrape the photograph’s lower border, and its back leg, caught mid-stride, flexes with potential. Seen as one component of the larger portal program, however, the lion is less a fearsome predator and more a ready guard. Figure 3 C athedral of Santiago de C ompostela, La C oruña, Spain, begun c . 1075, view of the Puerta de las P laterías (photo: José Luis Filpo C abana, Wikimedia C ommons). 22 Porter attributes A ferocious lion to “J. Roig,” likely Juan Roig, a commercial photographer based in Madrid. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 3 4 P h o to g r a p hs o f th e “D u s t o f th e H i g h w a y ” C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 King, in The Way of Saint James, also includes a photograph of the famed Puerta de las Platerías. In her image, titled simply Puerta de las Platerías, Porter’s “ferocious lion” becomes an inconspicuous housecat (fig. 4). Far from magnifying a single sculpture, Puerta de las Platerías includes the entirety of the cathedral’s southern transept. The photographer captures the full vertical extent of the façade, from the steps leading to the porta ls, to the first level’s portals and spandrel, to the second level’s paired windows, and finally to the roofline’s balustrade.23 The photograph also features a section of the cloister, to the le ft of the staircase, and the clock tower, to the portal’s right. Thus while A ferocious lion portrays a self-contained entity removed from its portal context, Puerta de las Platerías emphasizes the portal’s embeddedness in its broader architectural site. Figure 4 Unidentified photographer, Puerta de las Platerías , from Georgiana Goddard King, The Way of Saint James , vol. 3 (New York: G.P . P utnam’s Sons, 1920), page 145 (photo: author). In addition to the difference in scale, King’s Puerta de las Platerías bears traces of the circumstances behind its making. To the right of the photograph a broad shadow cast by the protruding clock tower sweeps across the cathedral, leaving recessed doorways and windows in varying degrees of darkness according to their depths and distances from the spire. The uneven lighting draws attention to other idiosyncrasies contained within the photograph, from its slightly slanted and plunging perspective to the sole open door in the le ft porta l. Unlike Porter’s Ferocious lion, the photograph selected by King prompts consideration of the time and place of its own manufacture. Already, King and Porter’s distinct photographic approaches to the same monument, Puerta de las Platerías, indicate substantial differences in their art historical projects. A ferocious lion, like nearly all of Porter’s 1,540 photographs in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, isolates a single sculptural element from its broader programmatic setting (figs. 5 and 6). According to Christopher Lakey, Porter’s tendency toward tightly cropped photographs allowed him to “reproduce aspects of medieval sculpture that would normally 23 As with other photographs and photogravures in The Way of Saint James, King does not credit the photographer of Puerta de las Platerías. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 3 5 A n n e m a r ie I k e r C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 escape the eyes of modern viewers.”24 This approach, he continues, resembles that of Walter Hege and Richard Hamann, German photographers contemporary with Porter who also trained their cameras on medieval sculpture.25 Like the photographs of Hege and Hamann, those included by Porter in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads demonstrate a high degree of visual precision. Porter, for instance, notes in his text that the Ferocious lion possesses “peculiar paws” and a “sardonic expression,” and that its “tail [is] cur led around behind his leg.”26 All of these traits are visible in Porter’s photograph but impossible to discern in King’s Puerta de las Platerías. Figure 5 Lucy P orter, Puerta de las Platerías . Western portal, wes tern jamb. Moses , from A rthur Kingsley P orter, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads , vol. 6 , Castile, As turias , Galicia (Bos ton: Marshall Jones Company, 1923), plate 682 (photo: author). The remaining seventeen of Porter’s eighteen photographs of the Puerta de las Platerías in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads move carefully across the Cathedra l’s southern façade. Frame by frame, the images proceed from west to east across the spandrel, then west to east across the tympana, and finally, west to east across the jambs and buttresses. After A ferocious lion, for instance, appears Upper zone, western end. Apostles, St. Peter, Expulsion, Angels (fig. 7). As the title indicates, this photograph encompasses a small portion of the leftmost part of the spandrel. The largest-scale photograph, Puerta de las Platerías, upper portion. Apostles, St. James, Christ, God the Father, Apostles , depicts the central segment of the spandrel (fig. 8). More typically, however, Porter’s photographs portray single figures, like A Bishop, or small figural groupings, like Apostles, Angels, St. Peter, an Apostle (figs. 9 and 10). 24 Lakey, “Contingencies of Display,” 87. 25 For a critical perspective on Hege’s photography, see Markus Hundemer, “Reiter & Co.—Der Fotograf Walter Hege (1893- 1955) und der Bamberger Dom,” in Dem Himmel entgegen: 1000 Jahre Kaiserdom Bamberg exh. cat., ed. Norbert Jung and Wolfgang F. Reddig, 183-192. 26 Porter, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, 1:213. Here, citing their formal similarities, Porter argues that Santiago de Compostela’s two lions (one has disappeared, according to Porter [1:213]) were copied some 50 years later by the sculptor who executed the lion of Saint Mark on the papal throne at the Cathédral d’Avignon. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 3 6 P h o to g r a p hs o f th e “D u s t o f th e H i g h w a y ” C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 Figure 6 J. Roig, Puerta de las Platerías . Eas tern tympanum. Adoration of the Magi; Doubting Thomas, Crowning with Thorns , Flagellation, Betrayal, from A rthur Kings ley Porter, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads , vol. 6 , Castile, As turias , Galicia (Bos ton: Marshall Jones Company, 1923), plate 680 (photo: author). Figure 7 Lucy P orter, Puerta de las Platerías . Upper zone, wes tern end. Apos tles , St. Peter, Expuls ion, Angels , from A rthur Kings ley P orter, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads , vol. 6 , Castile, As turias , Galicia (Bos ton: Marshall Jones C ompany, 1923), plate 675 (photo: author). http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 3 7 A n n e m a r ie I k e r C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 Figure 8 Roselló Mas, Puerta de las Platerías , upper portion. Apos tles , St. James , Chris t, God the Father, Apos tles , from A rthur Kings ley P orter, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads , vol. 6 , Castile, As turias , Galicia (Bos ton: Marshall Jones C ompany, 1923), plate 676 (photo: author). Here, the mutual dependence of image and text best demonstrates Porter’s underlying intent in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads. He begins his chapter on the Puerta de las Platerías by noting formal similarities in specific sculptural elements between this portal in Santiago de Compostela and the western portal of Saint-Sernin, in Toulouse. After dismissing the notion that a single “master” executed them both, he notes that “[i]t is, however, evident that one must have influenced the other. Which is the original?”27 In the chapter that follows, Porter places the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in a spatial and temporal genealogy extending along the Camino, a “chain which stretched from Santiago to the remote ends of Europe.”28 He relates the Galician cathedral to developments in sculpture and architecture to be found from Lombardy, in Italy, to Languedoc, in France. But the means by which he does this merit close attention. After posing the question of which cathedral came first, Santiago de Compostela or Saint-Sernin, Porter’s next sentence proves equally revealing: “The documents do not determine the question” (emphasis added).29 What will, Porter leaves unstated, is the meticulous formal analysis and comparison facilitated by his vast repository of visual evidence—that is, photographs. 27 Porter, Romanesque Sculpture, 1:211. 28 Ibid., 1:225. 29 Ibid., 1:211. It should be noted, however, that Porter in fact placed great importance on documentary evidence in dating (see for instance “The Chronological Problem,” Romanesque Sculpture, 1:3-17). He simply considered the existing documentary evidence inadequate in the case of the Puerta de las Platerías. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 3 8 P h o to g r a p hs o f th e “D u s t o f th e H i g h w a y ” C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 Figure 9 Roselló Mas, Puerta de las Platería. Eas tern portal, wes tern jamb. A Bishop, from A rthur Kings ley P orter, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads , vol. 6 , Castile, As turias , Galicia (Bos ton: Marshall Jones C ompany, 1923), plate 683 (photo: author). Porter, in the preface to his earlier book, Medieval Architecture (1909), writes that he has “preferred photographs whenever available as being more accurate and presenting architectural forms as they actually appear.”30 The ratio of plates to text in his scholarship reflects this belief in the “accuracy” of photographs. Medieval Architecture features 1,010 pages of text to 289 plates; in Lombard Architecture, the numbers climb to 1,838 pages of text to 954 plates; and in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, photographs vastly outnumber prose, with 1,540 plates, and 412 pages of text.31 This latter book fills ten volumes, one of them devoted exclusively to prose and the other nine, remarkably, devoted exclusively to full-page photographs. While the prose and photographs in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads appear in distinct volumes, Porter links them tightly by making frequent reference to plates. In his chapter on the Puerta de las Platerías, for instance, Porter notes, “[t]he same extraordinary mixture of subjects exists to-day in the tympana (Ill. 678-680)” directing readers to visual confirmation of the tympana’s heterogeneity across three different photographs.32 The plates themselves, moreover, feature long titles which systematica lly locate the sculptures by city, province, monument, and position within the monument. Titles also provide iconographic explication, as in this example from the Puerta de las P later ías: “Santiago de Compostela [city], (La Coruña) [province], Catedral [monument]. Puerta de las Platerías, western jamb [position within monument]. Creation of Adam; God reproves Adam 30 Porter, Medieval Architecture: Its Origins and Development (New York: The Baker and Taylor Company, 1909), viii. 31 For the source of these figures on the ratio between images and text in Porter’s scholarship, see Friedrich Kestel, “The Arthur Kingsley Porter Collection of Photography and the European Preservation of Monuments,” Visual Resources 9 (1994): 365. 32 Porter, Romanesque Sculpture, 1:213. Emphasis added. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 3 9 A n n e m a r ie I k e r C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 and Eve; Angels, Prophets [iconography].”33 Unsurprisingly, just the list of illustrations accompanying Porter’s 1,540 photographs fills tens of pages. Porter, to be sure, argues as much through images as words. Figure 10 J. Roig, Apostles , Angels , St. Peter, an Apos tle, from A rthur Kings ley Porter, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads , vol. 6 , Castile, As turias , Galicia (Bos ton: Marshall Jones C ompany, 1923), plate 688 (photo: author). King, though, displays a different attitude toward photography. She writes in the forward to The Way of Saint James, “Spain is a long way off, and pictures are not always explic it.” 34 Certainly, King makes less use of photographs than Porter: The Way of Saint James reverses his ratio of images to prose, with 37 plates and 1,687 pages of text. King, furthermore, embeds photographs into her three volumes. Unlike Porter, she intersperses her text at varying intervals with illustrations—some, full-page photogravures, and others, photographs that share the page with words. Often, these illustrations bear no direct relation to the prose nearest to them, and searching for relevant passages requires considerable page-thumbing. Perhaps most noticeably, while Porter’s photographs focus exclusively on sculpture, K ing includes a much wider array of imagery. Among the subjects of photographs included in The Way of Saint James are mountain ranges, plazas, bridges, markets, and farmers; many photographs, moreover, contain landscape, architectural, and human elements in a s ingle composition (figs. 11 and 12). Figure 11 Unidentified photographer, A Little Town in Leon, from Georgiana Goddard King, The Way of Saint James , vol. 2 (New York: G.P . P utnam’s Sons, 1920), page 235 (photo: author). 33 Porter, Romanesque Sculpture, vol. 6, Illustrations: Castile, Asturias, Galicia, 7. 34 King, The Way of Saint James, 1:iii-iv. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 4 0 P h o to g r a p hs o f th e “D u s t o f th e H i g h w a y ” C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 Figure 12 Unidentified photographer, The Thursday Market in Es tella, from Georgiana Goddard King, The Way of Saint James , vol. 1 (New York: G.P . P utnam’s Sons, 1920) opposite page 326 (photo: author). King’s photographs in The Way of Saint James number fewer than Porter’s in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads. They also appear less methodically ordered and titled. Even so, they express her purpose as aptly. Puerta de las Platerías, for instance, permits factors external to the façade to intercede in its representation (fig. 4). Contingencies like shadow, sunlight, and perspective each mark the cathedral’s southern entrance, generating speculation as to the photographer’s viewpoint, the time of day, the season, and even weather conditions. While this may be true of all photographs, a composition like Ferocious lion purposefully minimizes circumstances beyond its subject. It is these very circumstances, by contrast, from which Puerta de las Platerías derives some of its most significant visual qualities. In the forward to The Way of Saint James, King rather strikingly states her interest in social, religious, historical, and circumstantial factors external to the works of art and architecture she encounters. There, she directs readers “who desire to secure facts while avoiding the context” to her index. “This makes it possible,” she continues, “for the learned to look up a church unmolested by the dust of the highway.”35 But King herself is as interested in the “dust of the highway” as the church. Better put, she is as interested in the church and how “dust” shapes perception of the church—and, for that matter, perception of all else that is to be found along the highway. 35 King, The Way of Saint James, 1:v. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 4 1 A n n e m a r ie I k e r C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 King’s recounting of the twelfth-century pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela by French monk Aimery Picaud exemplifies this interest.36 Of particular relevance is a passage in which she interweaves speculation about the physical appearance of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in the twelfth century with her imaginative reconstruction of Picaud’s experience there: For him, the crypt has become fabulous: there lies S. James in a marble ark, in a fair vaulted sepulcher, wonderful for size and workmanship; it is lighted heavenly-wise with carbuncles like the gems of the New Jerusalem, and the air is kept sweet with divine odours; waxen tapers with heavenly radiance light it and angelic service cares for it.37 As in the photograph Puerta de las Platerías, this passage portrays the site at hand—the crypt below the ground level of the cathedral, with a tomb supposedly containing the remains of Saint James38—through layers of sensory apprehension. King’s sensitivity to scale, texture, light, and even smell conjure the crypt as a space experienced rather than a purely architectural space. If Puerta de las Platerías evokes a clear, bright morning due to the shadows stretching west across the façade away from the eastern clock tower, this passage, helped by King’s liberal use of adjectives like “fabulous,” “fair,” “sweet,” and “divine,” casts the scene in a wondrous, deeply felt aura of religious marvel. King’s dedication to conveying experience in The Way of Saint James encompasses individuals with less historical import than Picaud, presumed author of the famed Camino de Santiago guide-book, the Codex Calixtinus. Once in Santiago de Compostela, for instance, King observes a shortage of religious faith. There, she perceives “gravity, but on the whole little devotion.”39 While her description of the cathedral’s crypt as beheld by P icaud bathes the scene in beatitude, lay worshipers in Santiago receive rougher treatment. “At the shr ine you see men kneeling a little awe-struck,” she says, but, “at the gold, or at the age?” Likewise, she writes, “[y]ou find a group of women saying litanies. But S. James means nothing to them, he is only the means of making magic.”40 This frank ascription of transactional motives to worship—and significantly, the appeal of material opulence— indicates the range of people and the breadth of experience that King considers worthy of study. From pious medieval monks to calculating contemporaries, she extends her thought to both the lofty ideals and complex realities of faith. Two additional images of Santiago de Compostela in The Way of Saint James, The Fountain at Santiago and A Beggar by the Puerta Santa, make evident King’s curiosity, 36 Aimery (or Aymeric) Picaud, a monk and scholar from Poitou, undertook the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela around 1140 (though King says, “not later than 1138” [58]). He is credited by historians with authorship and/or editorship of the Codex Calixtinus (occasionally called The Book of Saint James), five volumes on the Camino de Santiago containing liturgies, reports of miracles, and a traveler’s guide. See Jan Van Herwaarden, Between Saint James and Erasmus: Studies in Late-Medieval Religious Life (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 356-361. Millán Bravo Lozano also offers a helpful introduction to and contextualization of the Codex Calixtinus in Guía del peregrino medieval. Introducción, traducción, y notas (Sahagún: Centro de Estudios del Camino de Santiago, 1990). For a gripping, recently published work of historical fiction in which Picaud appears, see Lucy Pick, Pilgrimage (New York: Cuidono Press, 2014). 37 King, The Way of Saint James, 3:59. 38 To the question of whether Saint James’s remains are actually in the tomb at the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, Conant answers, “[t]he Middle Ages were much surer that he was than we can be.” Conant, Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, 4. 39 King, The Way of Saint James, 3:23-24. 40 Ibid., 3:24. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 4 2 P h o to g r a p hs o f th e “D u s t o f th e H i g h w a y ” C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 empathy, and expansive gaze. In The Fountain, two women gather water at the Fuente de los Caballos (Fountain of the Horses), in the plaza immediately adjacent to the cathedral’s Puerta de las Platerías (fig. 13). The women perform a prosaic chore, indifferent to the ir proximity to one of Christianity’s most sacred sites. The woman at the left stands as stout and imperious as her monogrammed, bell-shaped jug, and the younger woman to the r ight leans against the fountain’s lip, concealing what appears to be a grimace with her hand. Curiously, these women recall an earlier description of Santiago’s faithful. King, in a passage already quoted, observes “little devotion” in Santiago “except,” she continues, “sometimes in the case of women: young women, who are afraid of life and take precautions: or elder ones who have suffered in life, and look for anodyne.”41 This written sketch is in no way paired formally with The Fountain. Still, its inclusion of another human dimension to fa ith—adding the alleviation of fear and suffering to the attraction of “gold,” “age,” and “magic” —seems applicable to these women, one younger and palpably timid, and the other, older and outwardly hardened. Figure 13 Unidentified photographer, The Fountain at Santiago, from Georgiana Goddard King, The Way of Saint James , vol. 3 (New York: G.P . P utnam’s Sons, 1920), oppos ite page 54 (photo: author). In A Beggar by the Puerta Santa, like The Fountain, architecture provides the backdrop to human life (fig. 14). The “beggar” advances along the cathedral’s east entrance, which plays a meaningful role in lived ritual at Santiago de Compostela. The Puerta Santa (Holy Door) opens to the public only during Saint James Holy Years; through the portal, the public may enter the rear ambulatory, behind the altar, and descend the staircase leading to Saint James’ crypt (fig. 15).42 But the left edge of the photograph included by King aligns a lmost 41 King, The Way of Saint James, 3:24. 42 The Puerta Santa is opened to the public during Años Santos Jacobeos (also called Años Santos Compostelanos), years in which July 25 (Saint James’s Day) falls on a Sunday. Miguel Taín Guzmán gives an account of the social history of the Puerta Santa and festivals associated with it in “Arquitecturas festivas catedralicias: los castillos y las fachadas de los fuegos del apóstol Santiago,” Ciencias Sociais e Humanidades 22 (2010): 495-518. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 4 3 A n n e m a r ie I k e r C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 precisely with the right edge of the Puerta Santa. This effectively eliminates the portal from view. In fact, all that is visible of the Puerta Santa in A Beggar by the Puerta Santa is s ix of the twenty-four sculpted doormen comprising the portal’s frame.43 The photograph’s flat lighting and slanted angle, moreover, cause the sculptures to recede into their alcoves. Figure 14 Unidentified photographer, A Beggar by the Puerta Santa, from Georgiana Goddard King, The Way of Saint James , vol. 3 (New York: G.P . P utnam’s Sons, 1920), page 109 (photo: author). In A Beggar by the Puerta Santa, it is not the famed and titular portal that occupies the most space. Instead, the stone paving of the Plaza de la Quintana and the unarticulated eastern façade of the cathedral loom large. Of course, these elements serve to highlight the photograph’s real subject, its “beggar.” Not coincidentally, it seems, he bears a striking physical resemblance to the sculpted Saint James who presides over the out-of-frame Puerta Santa (fig. 16). Like the sculpture of Saint James, the passerby has long hair, a staff, and a wide-brimmed hat which he has removed, in apparent acknowledgement of the photographer. Intriguingly, the man grasps his staff just like the nearby sculpture of Saint James: the two fingers closest to his thumb wrap around his walking stick, while the remaining two curl beneath it. A Beggar by the Puerta Santa, with its preference for the human figure over the sculpted figure, typifies King’s commitment to portraying experience. Rather than a photograph of the celebrated Puerta Santa and its revered Saint James, she instead chooses to feature a humble pilgrim passing perpendicular to his stone look-alike. 43 Emilia Lamelas and Jesús María Cendán discuss the seventeenth-century Puerta Santa and its sculpted doormen in greater detail in their article on its restoration, “La nueva Puerta Santa, Catedral de Santiago de Compostela,” Restauración & rehabilitación 93 (2004): 58-63. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 4 4 P h o to g r a p hs o f th e “D u s t o f th e H i g h w a y ” C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 Figure 15 C athedral of Santiago de C ompostela, La C oruña, Spain, begun c . 1075, view of the Puerta Santa (Holy Door) (photo, 1960: William Keighley, A RTstor). Figure 16 C athedral of Santiago de C ompostela, La C oruña, Spain, begun c . 1075, view of Saint James , P uerta Santa (Holy Door) (photo, 2006: Wikimedia Commons). King and the “Pilgrim’s Perspective” In 1913, at Bryn Mawr College, King offered the first graduate course on Spanish art in the United States.44 Until her death in 1939, King would teach and publish tirelessly on secular and ecclesiastical medieval art and architecture of the Iberian Peninsula.45 For King, the appeal of Iberia lay in the opportunity for discovery: in her assessment, medieval Spain had not yet “become a part of the general scheme of things as Siena.”46 Despite her early 44 Saunders, “Georgiana Goddard King,” 210. 45 Though King dedicated much of her career to the medieval art and architecture of Spain, her interest turned toward Portugal near the end of her life. At the time of her death, she was working on a manuscript on Portugal that remains unpublished and can be found among her papers at Bryn Mawr’s Canaday Special Collections library. See Saunders, “Georgiana Goddard King,” 230. 46 Mann, “Georgiana Goddard King,” 113. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 4 5 A n n e m a r ie I k e r C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 contributions to medievalism, however, many historiographies of the field omit King altogether, focusing instead on luminaries like Arthur Kingsley Porter, his French sparring partner Emile Mâle, and his students Kenneth Conant and Walter Muir Whitehill.47 According to Janice Mann, one of the few art historians to offer a critical reappraisal of King in the twenty-first century, “King and her work have all but vanished from current scholarly memory.”48 Despite the tendency to attribute King’s neglect to gender bias, a dif ferent factor appears equally significant. This factor—itself gendered, to be sure—is the early twentieth- century conceptualization of art history as an academic discipline distinct from amateur aesthetics and connoisseurship. Porter, though removed from the German formation of a scientific art history, or Kunstwissenschaft, contributed to and benefitted from its inroads in the United States.49 Indeed, Kathryn Brush credits Porter’s growing interest in artistic attribution, dating, and provenance in the 1920s to his recent immersion in German scholarship. As she writes, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads “needs to be interpreted as the first major American rejoinder, or even rival, to certain established genres of German art history.”50 Porter’s relationship to German Kunstwissenschaft was hardly simple or stagnant. Stil l, the title of the first chapter in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads—“The Chronological Problem”—indicates the degree to which his art historical imperatives a ligned with those gaining purchase within the academy both stateside and abroad. In his recent survey of the “Modern Origins of Romanesque Sculpture,” for instance, Robert Maxwell has demonstrated that the early twentieth-century search for the genesis of medieval sc ulpture caused many art historians to focus on classification according to date, region, material, and style.51 The question Porter asked of the cathedrals of Santiago de Composte la and Saint - Sernin—“Which is the original?”—fits comfortably within this paradigm. But King’s photographs, as much as her prose, reveal the gulf between her own art historical objectives and methods, and those of her peers and successors. If King has effectively “vanished” (or, been vanquished) why return to her and her genre-defying book, The Way of Saint James? Madeline Caviness, Janice Mann, and Susanna Terrell Saunders, King’s three recent champions in the United States, offer a variety of reasons. For Mann, King’s writing provides a barometer of rapid changes within art history in the first half of the twentieth century. As she writes, “[b]y the 1930s the personal grounding 47 Porter and Mâle famously disagreed over the origins of Romanesque sculpture, with Mâle arguing for the primacy of Languedoc and Toulouse, and Porter emphasizing the pilgrimage roads as transnational carriers of artistic and architectural styles. See Porter’s review of Mâle’s L’art religieux du XII siècle en France (1922), “Spain or Toulouse? And Other Questions,” The Art Bulletin 7 (1924): 2-25. 48 Mann, “Georgiana Goddard King,” 111. For a historiographic study of Spanish medieval art and architecture that explores the evolution of what Mann terms “current scholarly memory,” see John W. Williams, “Spain or Toulouse? A Half Century Later, Observations on the Chronology of Santiago de Compostela,” in Actas XXIII Congreso Internacional de Historia del Arte. Granada. 1973 (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1976), 557-567; and Williams, “The Emergence of Spanish Romanesque Sculpture: A Century of Scholarship,” in Current Directions in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Sculpture Studies, ed. Robert A. Maxwell and Kirk Ambrose (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 188-196. 49 For an account of Porter’s attitudes toward developments in German art history, see Brush, “German Kunstwissenschaft and the Practice of Art History in America after World War I. Interrelationships, Exchanges, Contexts,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 26 (1999): 12-14. 50 Brush, “German Kunstwissenschaft,” 14. 51 Robert Maxwell, “Modern Origins of Romanesque Sculpture,” in A Companion to Medieval Art, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 334-356. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 4 6 P h o to g r a p hs o f th e “D u s t o f th e H i g h w a y ” C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 of much of King’s scholarship caused it to lose credibility with the next generation of art historians, whose art historical methods were more regimented and scientif ic.”52 Saunders strikes a similar note, suggesting that King’s “‘passionate’ attachment to Spanish culture, ironically, tended to restrict the effectiveness of her art historical scholarship.” 53 Caviness, meanwhile, identifies King’s life and work as another example of what she describes elsewhere as the “symbiosis between modern artists and medievalists.”54 She sees King, and her joint research and photographing expeditions in Spain with Edith Lowber, her partner and travelling companion, as “part of a drive toward modernity.”55 Crucially, both Caviness and Mann highlight King’s forgotten career as a symptom of the status of women within art history and academia at large. For Cav iness, K ing’s “is a ta le about the silencing of women.”56 Mann, moreover, stresses that it was King who first sparked Porter’s interest in the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. According to Mann, a lecture given by King at Haverford College in 1914 inspired Porter’s research for Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads57—a book, it bears repeating, frequently credited with introducing Anglo-American intellectuals to medieval Spain. This story, and Porter’s apparent failure to properly acknowledge King, would seem to confirm Judith Bennett’s observations about the conflicted status of women medievalists in her article “Medievalism and Feminism.” There, she explains that female scholars achieved earlier and greater acceptance in medieval studies than other fields; even so, she writes, “women have been kept segregated from an d subordinated to the mainstream.”58 Another reason to revisit King and particularly, The Way of Saint James, looks forward from King’s era into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. New directions in Romanesque scholarship suggest that King’s writing in fact prefigured many contemporary art historical concerns. Caviness, for one, writes that King’s career can be seen not only as part of the “drive toward modernity” but even as “presaging a post-modern breaking down of disciplinary boundaries.”59 Certainly, The Way of Saint James—not to mention, King’s other books—resist straightforward classification as art history given their historical, literary, archeological, and religious insights. Revealingly, the very eclecticism that troubled severa l of King’s critics now seems prescient. Remember that Porter, for instance, felt King “had her hands far too full with the vast subject of the pilgrimage roads to be able to undertake the thousands of patient measurements, the conscientious checking up of results, the stone-for- stone study of the building required for an architectural monograph.”60 In other words, Porter 52 Mann, “Georgiana Goddard King,” 121. 53 Saunders, “Georgiana Goddard King,” 231. 54 Caviness, “Broadening the Definitions of ‘Art’: The Reception of Medieval Works in the Context of Post-Impressionist Movements,” in Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture, ed. Patrick J. Gallacher and Helen Damico (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), 259-282. 55 Caviness, “Seeking Modernity through the Romanesque,” 4. 56 Ibid., 3. 57 Mann observes that Porter discretely credited King with having shown him helpful photographs in “The Development of Sculpture in Lombardy in the Twelfth Century” (1915). See Mann, “Frontiers and Pioneers: American Art Historians Discover Medieval Spain,” in Romanesque Architecture and its Sculptural Decoration in Christian Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 21. 58 Judith M. Bennett, “Medievalism and Feminism,” Speculum 68 (1993): 313. 59 Caviness, “Seeking Modernity through the Romanesque,” 4. 60 Porter, “Santiago Again,” Art in America 15 (1927): 5-6. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 4 7 A n n e m a r ie I k e r C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 felt that King’s broad, interdisciplinary exploration of the Camino de Santiago hindered her ability to undertake serious art historical research and to produce sound art historical scholarship. Now, King’s writing appears newly relevant, and even complementary to that of Porter. As remarkable as King’s precocious transgression of disciplinary boundaries, though, is her attentiveness to both historical and contemporary beggars, worshipers, and pilgr ims. Paula Gerson, in “Art and Pilgrimage: Mapping the Way” (2006), writes that early art historical scholarship centered along medieval pilgrimage routes long focused exclusively upon images, objects, and buildings. More recently, however, scholars have moved away from the description, classification, and morphological designation of these works. Now, of greater interest is how residents and visitors have perceived them. “Rather than imposing an artificial model on monuments,” she summarizes, “today’s scholars prefer to understand pilgrimage from the pilgrim’s point of view.”61 Likewise, for Christopher Lakey, “A comprehension of a medieval ‘way of seeing’ is probably more important now than ever before.”62 King, of course, trained her eye and her pen on medieval and contemporary experience. She readily adopted a “pilgrim’s point of view,” although this distanced her scholarship from what Lakey terms the “art historical ‘way of seeing’”63 then gaining traction among her colleagues. King considered individual experience a valid, even essential, line of art historical inquiry. Her dedication to experience—past and present, her own and others’— is evident throughout the three volumes of The Way of Saint James.64 Indeed, both Mann and Saunders have observed King’s “personal grounding” (Mann’s term) and “‘passionate ’ attachment” (Saunders’ term) in her writing on the Camino de Santiago. But King’s photographs, it should be noted, expose these traits just as readily. This is particularly evident in King’s approach to a carved capital in the c lo ister of San Pedro de la Rúa, in the Camino town of Estella. Here, text and image prove complementary, with prose offering a straightforward iconographic reading of the capital, and the photograph supplying a jolt of subjective authenticity. From King’s verbal descriptions of the histor iated capitals, the one photographed can be identified as the Entombment of Christ. Capita l at Estella would seem to offer an uncomplicated view of this sculpture, characterized succinctly by King as depicting a “carved sarcophagus, set high on four legs” (fig. 17).65 Closer inspection of Capital at Estella, though, reveals a more personal approach. The sarcophagus itself and the sculpted figures beside and above it are actually difficult to discern: rather than a level, tightly cropped view of the sculpture—as Porter likely would have supplied—the photographer replicates the familiar view that results from looking upward at a capital. Because of the tipped-back perspective, other elements feature in the composition—a sliver of the arcade’s ceiling, the underside of its rounded stone arch, the 61 Paula Gerson, “Art and Pilgrimage: Mapping the Way,” in Rudolph, A Companion to Medieval Art, 610. 62 Lakey, “Contingencies of Display,” 89. 63 Ibid. 64 King shared her interest in experience, perception, and consciousness with phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Unfortunately, I have found no concrete evidence that King followed the development of phenomenological thought in the early twentieth century. Still, given King’s postgraduate coursework in philosophy, research into her awareness of phenomenology and other philosophical currents would no doubt improve our understanding of her art historical scholarship. 65 King, The Way of Saint James, 1:341. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 4 8 P h o to g r a p hs o f th e “D u s t o f th e H i g h w a y ” C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 neighboring capital, and treetops in the courtyard. Though it fails to provide a clear image of the sculpture in question, Capital at Estella captures something else: the point of view of the photographer, and likewise, those who have craned their necks in a cloister. The effect, it goes without saying, is quite different from Porter’s desire to facilitate what Lakey terms an “art historical ‘way of seeing’” rather than a “medieval ‘way of seeing.’”66 Figure 17 Unidentified photographer, Capital at Es tella, from Georgiana Goddard King, The Way of Saint James , vol. 1 (New York: G.P . P utnam’s Sons, 1920), page 349 (photo: author). King, unlike Porter, considered herself a pilgrim and wrote transparently about the sensory layers between her and the monuments she encountered. Often, these layers are unpleasant: King openly admits to experiencing the fatigue, hunger, boredom, and general discomfort of pilgrimage. In one passage, she describes the tedious landscape approaching León: “The tawny upland is dotted with brown church towers all just alike: you look up after an hour and think you are come back in a circle.”67 Few art historians would admit the occasional repetitiveness of their research, but for King, this imbues the eventual “spires of Leon” with an “unguessed grace, a charm, a spell of the exquisite.”68 Put another way, it is passing through the unrelieved Castilian plains that makes sight of León’s cathedral feel l ike deliverance. Elsewhere, King directly addresses the loneliness of solitary research, particularly for women. Of winter nights in Pamplona, home to the raucous running of the bulls during summertime sanfermines, King says: For a woman alone, they are hard. She has been out seeing things while the daylight lasted and is honestly tired; moreover, most churches close at nightfall 66 Lakey, “Contingencies of Display,” 89. 67 King, The Way of Saint James, 2:176. 68 Ibid., 2:177. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 4 9 A n n e m a r ie I k e r C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 and the rest have nothing by any chance worth seeing even were they not wrapped in a midnight of their own, just starred with votive candles.69 Photographs like Eunate and El Sepulcro evoke the intermittent solitude and melancholy along the Camino de Santiago (figs. 18 and 19). In El Sepulcro, a c luster of children and birds gather at the east end of a church in Torres. While they are not the focus of the photograph, they are impossible to overlook. King’s description of her v isit to the church expresses similar ambivalence. An earlier art historian had warned King about the children in Torres and their tendency to interrupt work; she writes, somewhat unkindly, “[t]hey are indeed tiresome as gnats, but not bad-hearted . . . their elders rebuked and dispersed them a dozen times, but always they gathered again, filling the open doorway of the empty church, and blotting out the patch of sunlight on the floor.”70 For King, with her measuring tape and camera, the children and their antics prove a nuisance. Still, the chosen photograph creates a subtle layering of human lives against a church that King goes on to characterize as layered itself, with Greek, Roman, Romanesque, and “Oriental” sources, and French, Italian, and Mudéjar craftsmanship, all “gathered up by the side of the Way.”71 Figure 18 Unidentified photographer, Eunate, from Georgiana Goddard King, The Way of Saint James , vol. 1 (New York: G.P . P utnam’s Sons, 1920), oppos ite page 230 (photo: author). A photograph taken in front of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela’s Puerta de las Platerías encompasses the emphasis on experience, the pilgrim’s perspective, and the se lf - reflexivity characteristic of The Way of Saint James. The Pilgrim in Santiago stands before the Platerías portal, but with the photographer shooting away from the portal and toward the Fuente de los Caballos at the base of the steps (fig. 20). The photograph’s rightward t ilt echoes that of the pilgrim: the slight inclination of his body suggests the incessant push forward of the Camino, albeit come to an end in Santiago de Compostela. As one might expect, King reveals that his traditional dress inspired the photograph. The pilgrim wears a dark robe studded with scallop shells, the symbol associated with Saint James and the Camino de Santiago, and he bears its customary accessories, the wide-brimmed hat and staff. Struck by the similarity of the man’s appearance to Saint Francis, King writes, she 69 King, The Way of Saint James, 1:261. 70 Ibid., 1:310. 71 Ibid., 1:321. “Mudéjar” refers to architecture influenced by the Moorish settlement of Spain. King’s Mudéjar (1927) focuses exclusively on the significance of North African, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian style and craftsmanship to medieval and early modern Spanish architecture. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 5 0 P h o to g r a p hs o f th e “D u s t o f th e H i g h w a y ” C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 requested a portrait. He “readily yielded; then asked an alms. Why not? G ive and take is fair.”72 Throughout The Way of Saint James, King strives verbally and visually to access different perceptions of the same monuments and traditions along the Camino de Santiago. Nonetheless, she tacitly acknowledges that she will be the one to relay these perceptions through prose and photographs. Indeed, in images like A Pilgrim in Santiago, the specif icity of individual experience becomes manifest: King’s photo-op is another man’s charity-op, and her medieval reverie comes to an abrupt halt with their monetary exchange. Time and again, King maneuvers between her commitment to portraying experience and her recognition that any experience aside from her own, whether medieval or contemporary, remains to some degree unattainable. As The Way of Saint James makes plain, this too is part of the “give and take” of art historical writing—a give and take, King would be gratif ied to learn, ever more important to students and scholars today. Figure 19 Unidentified photographer, El Sepulcro, from Georgiana Goddard King, The Way of Saint James , vol. 1 (New York: G.P . P utnam’s Sons, 1920), page 311 (photo: author). Figure 20 Unidentified photographer, A Pilgrim at Santiago, from Georgiana Goddard King, The Way of Saint James vol. 2 (New York: G.P . P utnam’s Sons, 1920), page 483 (photo: author). 72 King, The Way of Saint James, 3:23. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 5 1 A n n e m a r ie I k e r C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 Acknowledgements For early guidance on this paper, I would like to thank Peter Low at Williams C ollege. Paul Park and my peers in his writing seminar at Williams read early versions of this paper and their comments greatly improved it. I am especially grateful to my anonymous peer reviewers, and to my editors at Contemporaneity, Jacqueline Lombard and Elizabeth Morrissey, for their encouragement and suggestions. Lastly, I extend my gratitude to Marianne Hansen at Bryn Mawr College’s Special Collections for helping me navigate Georgiana Goddard King’s papers and providing me with her portrait. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 5 2 P h o to g r a p hs o f th e “D u s t o f th e H i g h w a y ” C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.149 New articles in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 United States License. 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