A237 Art and Life Before 1800, Book 3 PDF

A237 Art and life before 1800 Book 3 Art in Action Edited by Carla Benzan This publication forms part of the Open University module A237 Art and life before 1800. Details of this and other Open University modules can be obtained from Student Recruitment, The Open University, PO Box 1...

A237 Art and life before 1800 Book 3 Art in Action Edited by Carla Benzan This publication forms part of the Open University module A237 Art and life before 1800. Details of this and other Open University modules can be obtained from Student Recruitment, The Open University, PO Box 197, Milton Keynes MK7 6BJ, United Kingdom (tel. +44 (0)300 303 5303; email [email protected]). Alternatively, you may visit the Open University website at www.open.ac.uk where you can learn more about the wide range of modules and packs offered at all levels by The Open University. The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA First published 2025. Unless otherwise stated, copyright © 2025 The Open University, all rights reserved. All rights reserved. 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ISBN 978 1 4730 3913 1 1.1  Contents Introduction 1 Carla Benzan Chapter 11 Ritual 7 Carla Benzan and Robert Wallis Chapter 12 Mobility 47 William Kynan-Wilson and Andrew Murray Chapter 13 Collecting 93 William Kynan-Wilson and Clare Taylor Chapter 14 Worship 131 Angeliki Lymberopoulou and Margit Thøfner Chapter 15 Death 169 Andrew Murray and Margit Thøfner Glossary 205 Acknowledgements 211 Index 213  Introduction Carla Benzan Introduction You have now passed the halfway point on your journey through Art and life before 1800. On behalf of all the authors of this module I hope that you have enjoyed exploring the themes and artworks introduced so far. The first two books invited you to examine art made before 1800 through two different lenses: by considering the ways that art was enmeshed within its environments, and the vital significance of making to the meanings of artworks. Art in Action introduces a third way of approaching the connection between people’s lives and art, the guiding concern of Art and life before 1800 – what happens when artworks leave their makers’ hands and move out into the world? To answer this question, it is crucial to understand that artworks were not objects of purely visual consumption or ‘appreciation’ at this time. As the Module Introduction in Book 1 made clear, such views are more relevant to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when particular notions of art as a category set apart as ‘Art’ gradually took hold (Shiner, 2003). By contrast, before 1800, artworks invited action and interaction. At its core this book is about the things that people do with art across a surprising range of contexts and circumstances. You have already encountered some of the ways that people interacted with artworks. In Art and its Environments, for example, you learned that the Nasca peoples held ritual processions along their geoglyphs that involved eating, drinking and making music. You also considered the ways that members of the court of Louis XIV spatially navigated the garden landscape at Versailles. This book builds on the previous ones and explores ways that artworks were active in the overlapping political, social, intellectual, religious and economic spheres of human life. To set the stage, this introduction examines two threads woven through Book 3: first, that an artwork is part of ever-changing historical circumstances and, second, that it is difficult to pin down how things were used in the past. 1 Change is the only constant Art is always in action. Artworks are subject to new uses and meanings as different people engage with them or as their physical location changes. Before 1800, many artworks were physically mobile, and people used them differently across various contexts and spaces. Other artworks were relatively static (such as architecture or fresco) but could be added to, adapted or changed. It is not accurate or useful for someone studying an artwork to assume that it has a single or static meaning. In fact, in art history, it is wise always to begin with the idea that meanings are plural and variable. The simple and elegant tea bowl in Plate iii.1 presents an excellent example of art in action. It is a footed vessel, with a subtly rounded form that flares slightly at the top to a thin rim. The crackled glaze lends a delicate lace-like texture to the surface of the bowl. The vessel is typical of simply glazed stoneware ceramics made in the Satsuma region on the third largest island in the Japanese archipelago (note that a very different kind of ceramic ware was made for export in Satsuma in later centuries, not to be confused with this earlier period of production). As you learned in Book 2, Chapter 7, stoneware is a durable ceramic medium often used to create objects used in daily life, including for serving food and drink. At the time this bowl was made, the ways that people used such items were formalised by the monk and tea master Sen no Rikyū (1522–1591) (Facing page) Unrecorded Japanese ceramicist and kintsugi practitioner, tea bowl, seventeenth century, white Satsuma-type stoneware with clear, crackled glaze, stained by ink with gold lacquer repairs, 11 × 12 cm, Japan (Kagoshima prefecture). National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, F1904.323 (detail from Plate iii.1). Photo: National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Freer Collection, Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1904.323. 1 Art in Action Plate iii.1 Unrecorded Japanese ceramicist and kintsugi practitioner, tea bowl, seventeenth century, white Satsuma-type stoneware with clear, crackled glaze, stained by ink with gold lacquer repairs, 11 × 12 cm, Japan (Kagoshima prefecture). National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, F1904.323. Photo: National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Freer Collection, Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1904.323. in the formal tea ceremony called chanoyu, usually taken to mean ‘the way of tea’ but literally translated as ‘hot water for tea’. Chanoyu was a ritual, by which I mean a prescribed set of collectively understood actions (you will learn more about ritual in Chapter 11). A host invites a small group of guests to their home to eat, drink, converse and be entertained in a carefully orchestrated way. Each stage of the ceremony required that the host and guests follow strict rules of bodily and oral comportment within an established and expected repertoire of behaviours undertaken in specific indoor and outdoor spaces (Kumakura, 2023, pp. 42–48). Chanoyu took many different, and sometimes competing, forms and involved many steps and stages. What I have included here is only a partial and general account of some of its main features. In general, guests purified themselves by washing their hands and mouths outside the tea room or tea house in the garden entrance (roji) as seen in Plate iii.2, before crawling through the deliberately small doorway that marked out the ritual space for the ceremony (Kumakura, 2023, p. 26). After they passed through the threshold the host served food and drink selected for each stage of the ceremony; these were served from ceramic and lacquer wares chosen by the host with equal care. The delicate bowl in Plate iii.1 was used in this context. At a crucial moment it was filled with fastidiously prepared matcha tea (steeped tea was less frequently used in chanoyu; ‘thick’ matcha is produced from whipping powdered tea leaves with hot water using a bamboo whisk). Guests then each sipped the tea from the bowl, wiping the rim before handing it to the person beside them in a process called mawashinomi, or ‘passing the bowl’ (Kumakura, 2023, p. 34). Understanding how the tea bowl might have been used contributes greatly to an understanding of its formal and visual qualities. The rounded body of the bowl would have rested easily in the hands of host and guests. The natural tones and delicate crackle decoration would have framed and complemented – rather than distracted from – the vibrant green colour of the tea. In this way the tea ceremony depended on spatial and material artworks like this one to establish and solidify social and political relationships and status through mawashinomi. 2  Book 3 Introduction Plate iii.2 Fushin’an tea room, Omotesenke estate, Kyoto. Photo: OMOTESENKE Fushin’an. The stones lead to the crawl-through entrance, at the small wooden shutter on the right side of the tea house. What is becoming clear, I hope, is the fact that understanding art made before 1800 requires consideration of the actions and behaviours that occur with and around an artwork, whether these are intentional (as in chanoyu) or unintentional. This brings us to something about this tea bowl that you may have already noticed: the tracery of gold lines that wrap around the upper area. These lines do not appear to be entirely in keeping with the crackle glaze. In fact, this addition to the the tea bowl came later, as the result of an unrecorded and likely accidental act. When the vessel was broken, it was repaired using the practice of kintsugi – literally translated as ‘gold joining’. Kintsugi is a skilled process in which the cracks of a broken ceramic ware are filled with lacquer as a glue; this lacquer is usually mixed or dusted with powdered gold. The result is a lustrous surface drawing attention to the fact that the vessel was once broken. Kintsugi is a clear example of how an artwork’s significance can change over time as a result of human action, use and adaptation but also the fact that action must be interpreted in its specific cultural context. Whereas in Europe, signs of wear and tear or damage would depreciate the value of a prized ceramic, kintsugi added value and new meanings to the original object. This art form embraces flaws as part of the Japanese wabi sabi philosophy that accepts and celebrates imperfection and impermanence as realities that cannot and should not be ignored. Clearly, wabi sabi differs profoundly from the European world views shown in the flawed marble block that you examined in Book 2, Chapter 6, Plate 6.2, which demonstrates just how differently actions and artworks could be perceived by different cultures. 2 How can an action be perceived? It can be tricky to perceive, comprehend and interpret art in action because human behaviour is ephemeral. This problem was articulated by one scholar thinking about the study of tea who wrote that ‘the relationship of language to experience lies at the heart of the study of culture’ (Pitelka, 2003, p. 12). What she means is that human experiences cannot be simply or 3 Art in Action straightforwardly deduced from textual documents or, on a more general level, easily explained in words. So, what should we do? What kinds of evidence shed light on how people interacted with art? How certain can we be that someone did something with an artwork several hundred, thousand or tens of thousands of years ago? There are rarely simple answers to these questions. One part of the answer lies in the importance of primary sources. Primary textual sources are drawn directly from first-hand historical accounts that took place at the same time or shortly after the production of an artwork. However, as you have already learned, primary sources can also be visual. Using visual analysis, artworks themselves provide art historians with a vital primary source of information. For example, my discussion of the tea bowl above depended on my own visual analysis of its formal qualities in tandem with primary texts that I read in a range of secondary sources (materials written or created by those who compile and analyse these primary sources at a later date). The illustration of a drawing room in Hardwick Hall in Book 1, Chapter 2, Plate 2.14, is a good example of a visual secondary source, while in Chapter 11, you will see an image that depicts a Viking burial ritual in Plate 11.22. Additionally, it is likely that different kinds of evidence will be useful for identifying actions and interactions with artworks from the past. Returning to the tea ceremony and the reflections of Pitelka, you can see that she addresses the limitations of relying too heavily on textual or linguistic evidence to understand chanoyu. Spoken language is abolished from certain portions of the tea gathering, replaced by focused and choreographed interactions that constitute a shared performance. The movements of preparing, serving, and drinking tea are physically internalized as forms (kata) by rote repetition rather than through lecture, dialogue, or interrogation. The hostility to rhetoric in tea culture – borrowed perhaps from Zen [a type of Buddhism] – partially explains why tea practitioners’ attempts to compose written histories have tended to reveal more about their absorption of modern paradigms of culture and history than about their subject matter. (Pitelka, 2003, p. 13) What Pitelka is saying is that language alone does not shed ample light on all the facets of chanoyu; moreover, translating this act of chanoyu into texts and treatises over time says more about the authors of those texts than chanoyu itself. Significantly, she uses ethnographic methods in her own research, which signals the importance of interdisciplinarity when studying art in action (Pitelka, 2003, pp. 13–14). Archaeology, cultural studies, anthropology and historical geography are among the varied disciplines and methods that can be used to complement art-historical analyses of primary sources, providing invaluable material evidence, ethnographic analogy and oral testimony to determine how artworks might have been used. By attending to the ways that people used and otherwise responded to art, this book is often, but not always, engaging with the reception of artworks. In art history the term reception generally describes ‘how viewers experience art’ (D’Alleva and Cothren, 2021, p. 110). This can include the things that people do with (and to) artworks, as well as their attitudes and ideas toward them. It is important to note that textual evidence has tended to dominate art- historical investigations of reception until recently. But basing an understanding of art on textual evidence alone privileges scribal cultures and tends to cast the rich potential of visual, material and spatial cultures as a passive or static ‘reflections’ of a pre-existing social reality. Seeing artworks as passive objects can fail to capture the nuanced agency, or power, of art in particular contexts. Therefore, at present, many art historians focus on this concept (you may find it helpful here to return to the definition of agency in the Appendix at the end of the Module Introduction in Book 1). Agency is particularly important for the study of artworks 4  Book 3 Introduction before 1800 when art sometimes came with a degree of personhood (for example, you have seen this in the animated sculptures discussed in Book 2, Chapter 6, and you will study agency in more detail in Chapter 11). As you will learn in this book, artworks were not ‘used’ as passive objects; people interacted with art in diverse and unpredictable ways, including as quasi-living entities with powerful effects. Partly for that reason, no single source of information can give us a complete picture of how an artwork was put into action. This may seem a challenging or daunting prospect, but it can also be exciting because it means that each person will have their own unique way of bringing together visual and textual evidence (primary and secondary) and connecting it to art. This is why Art in Action will encourage you to think critically about various kinds of textual, oral, material and visual primary sources when studying art made in the past. Art in Action begins with a chapter that examines many of the points raised earlier, focusing on the crucial role that art played in ritual behaviour before 1800. The concept of ritual has already been introduced in relation to chanoyu and is a fundamental topic for the study of art before 1800. Chapter 11 discusses ritual arts across a wide range of contexts, from prehistoric monuments to lifelike sculptures carried through the city streets of Andalusia in present-day Spain, and from Viking burial art to the visual and material cultures of feasting at European princely courts. The remaining chapters of Book 3 focus on different kinds of human interaction with art through paired case studies. Chapter 12 departs from a rigid and codified understanding of ritual to explore the more informal movement of art, materials, people and ideas in medieval England and the Saharan region of Africa. Here you will consider how movement changes things and their meanings in pilgrimage, trade and other kinds of activity. Chapter 13 focuses on courtly collecting in England and the Ottoman Empire; this chapter also explores how the physical movement of artworks as well as copying, reframing or adding to existing artworks changed their meanings. Chapter 14 investigates the ways that artworks were involved in spiritual and religious devotion, by looking at a pivotal moment in the history of art where images were destroyed or damaged in Byzantium and at West African sculptures that were central to the complex cosmologies of the Yorùbá. Finally, the last chapter, Chapter 15, examines the careful ways that human life is recognised and memorialised after death, in part through ritual behaviour focused on artworks. It investigates the visual and material cultures of burial in Inuit and Northern European contexts. Across all the examples and case studies you will encounter in this book, you will see that art was active in important areas of human (and other-than-human) life. Art could invoke changes in people’s environments, health, status and identity, as well as wider social and political transformations. It could support those in power or, conversely, contest the status quo; it was used in war, colonial expansion, funerary rites, feasts and acts of divination. You will encounter all of these and other kinds of behaviour in what follows. You will discover artworks that were gifted, stolen, copied, inherited, buried, framed, mounted, sold, damaged and destroyed (among other things). All these kinds of action involved, depended on, and were shaped by the artworks themselves. When people and artworks interacted, their lives, and history, were changed in the process. References D’Alleva, A. and Cothren, M. (2021) Methods and theories of art history. 3rd edn. London: Laurence King Publishing. Kumakura, I. (2023) Japanese tea culture: the heart and form of ‘chanyou’. Translated from the Japanese by M. J. McClintock. Tokyo: Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture. Pitelka, M. (ed.) (2003) Japanese tea culture: art, history and practice. London: Taylor and Francis. Shiner, L. (2003) The invention of art: a cultural history. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 5  Chapter 11 Ritual Carla Benzan and Robert Wallis Content warning This chapter contains descriptions of vomiting as a form of ritual in Section 2, an image of a bloodied Jesus in Plate 11.19, and mentions of human and animal sacrifice during a Viking death ritual in Section 3, which you may find distressing. Please refer to the guidance in the Module Introduction if these topics are concerning to you. Introduction The introduction to Book 3 that you just read has established that artworks can make people do things, or put differently, art is affective and has agency. Now you will explore that premise further with a focus on ritual behaviour, which is a particularly important category of human activity across all human cultures. To lay the groundwork we begin this chapter by defining the term ‘ritual’ and examining how it is central to art history before 1800 ce through the example of later prehistoric art and architecture in the British Isles. Subsequent sections examine two aspects of ritual arts in more detail: the agency of art in ritual, and the role played by art in the spectacular nature of many rituals. What is important to keep at the forefront of your mind is that ritual was inseparable from human life before 1800 and, crucially, that artworks played an indispensable role in ritual activity. Ritual is a capacious term, entering into everyday expression to connote a broad sense of actions that are repeated or regularly undertaken. For example, one dictionary definition describes ‘ritual’ (2023) as ‘an act or series of acts regularly repeated in a set precise manner’. In this view, a ritual is a formal sequence of behaviours performed in a specially sanctioned place. This understanding broadly aligns with how ritual is understood and used by art historians. However, ritual is often more than a simple routine or habit undertaken by a person in their daily life. Anthropological definitions of ritual are instructive here because anthropologists have defined ritual as a human practice that aims to invoke social change (e.g. Turner, 1967; Bell, 1997, pp. 23–60). That is to say, rituals are usually undertaken to invoke or catalyse some measurable or perceived impact on people’s lives; ritual transforms how people relate to one another and the world around them. This is not to say, however, that rituals are always positive, successful or reach a guaranteed outcome. They also involve uncertainty and, to a lesser or greater degree, an element of unpredictability or risk (Taussig, 1989, p. 57), and we return to this point in Section 3.2. All this is important for art historians who seek to understand how artworks were used in particular ritual contexts: if a ritual changes some aspect of human life, artworks have a powerful role to play in effecting that change. (Facing page) Unrecorded Taíno maker, vomitivo (spatula), c.1200–1500, carved wood, 42 × 4 × 4 cm, Dominican Republic. Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, Paris, 70.2008.37.1. Photo: © Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn/Michel Urtado/Thierry Ollivier (detail from Plate 11.10b). 7 Art in Action As one encyclopaedia entry notes, ritual is ‘a catchall term for a diverse set of cultural forms or practices, such as worship, baptism, parades, coronations, and festivals’ (Stephenson, 2022). Many of these examples of ritual have already been discussed in the first two parts of Art and life before 1800, and you will encounter others throughout the last two parts of the module. Applying this term to familiar examples in the activity below will help bring core aspects of ritual to life. Activity 11.1 Allow around 45 minutes to complete this activity. A wide variety of human behaviours have been referenced in Books 1 and 2; some of these behaviours could be considered rituals and others not. For this activity, look at the four examples below and decide if you think ritual behaviour was important to the ways people interacted with the artworks discussed in each case. As you consider each example, it will be helpful to return to your notes and the module books. Summarise your thoughts in two to three sentences for each example in whatever notetaking system you are using for the module. Try to provide a specific in-text citation for each example (formatting this as you would in an OU assessment, including the page number). ‘Swimming Reindeer’: Book 1, Chapter 1 Thames frost fairs: Book 1, Chapter 4 Terracotta sepulchres: Book 2, Chapter 7 Sinan mosque: Book 2, Chapter 10. Discussion Archaeologists speculate that the ‘Swimming Reindeer’ could have been used in rituals associated with hunting (Benzan and Wallis, 2024, p. 39). The object has no obvious utilitarian purpose; it is too fragile to be used as a spear thrower, for example. It is plausible that for the animist Ice Age hunters who depended heavily on reindeer-persons for their daily needs, such as food, furs and tools, the carved reindeer sculpture offered a tangible means by which to negotiate respectful relationships with the prey animal. Perhaps ritual specialists such as shamans used the object in their ceremonies to honour the spirits of reindeer that had been hunted, or to propitiate the spirits of reindeer yet to be hunted. The frost fairs were not places of ritual because people’s behaviours were not regularised or choreographed at these festivals. When the Thames froze over it became a liminal space very different from its use as a key royal ceremonial route when unfrozen (Murray and Taylor, 2024, p. 134). Artworks like prints, paintings and commemorative objects were purchased by attendees and it does not seem likely that they would have been used ritually. It is hard to determine precisely how the sculptural sepulchres were used from the information presented in the case study. For example, the primary source account of a Bohemian pilgrim did not describe his devotional practices in detail (Benzan and Newall, 2024, pp. 79–80). One would need to look for more information in some of the sources listed in the references or through additional independent research into confraternal devotion. The congregational mosque is primarily designed to facilitate ritual acts that are part of Islam, including the weekly sermon that is delivered on Fridays. Other buildings within the mosque complex relate to other behaviours; they include libraries, soup kitchens and educational facilities (Kynan-Wilson and West, 2024, pp. 179, 181).  8  Chapter 11 Ritual As this activity suggests, an immense breadth of activities and artworks were involved in ritual behaviour before 1800. Visual, material and spatial cultures responded to ritual practices, and shaped ritual landscapes in turn. To illuminate the importance of ritual and its key features, the first section of this chapter focuses on specific artworks that were closely intertwined with ritual: the prehistoric monuments of Stonehenge and Newgrange. 1 Later prehistoric art, architecture and ritual in the British Isles Many of the later prehistoric stone monuments erected in the British Isles from around the turn of the fourth millennium bce, some of which were in use for over 1500 years, are best understood in terms of ritual human behaviour. To draw directly on the earlier definition of ‘ritual’, the visual, material and spatial qualities of Stonehenge, for example, directly facilitated ritual as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘repeated actions or patterns of behaviour having significance within a particular social group’ (‘ritual’, 2024). This dynamic between monument, people, ritual and place may be hard to imagine today, when visitors to Stonehenge seldom have the chance to physically interact with the monument (as with the summer solstice celebrants in Plate 11.2); during most of the year, visitors are kept out of the inner circle by cordons, signs and security guards. As a result, tourists typically experience Stonehenge as an isolated monument in a landscape largely devoid of human presence. This perception is also reinforced through photographs that are reproduced for promotion, as is seen, for example in Plate 11.1. But as you will see, by drawing on archaeological evidence and interpretations, art historians can begin to understand how the art and architecture of Stonehenge may have structured people’s engagement with the site and its landscape. These relationships with the site also had transformative effects on how people related to one another and the world around them. Archaeologists agree that the formal qualities of Stonehenge, and its placement in a landscape of pre-existing monuments, indicate that the monument was a ritual place during the Neolithic to Bronze Age (c.3000–1900 bce), during a period spanning the spread of farming into the British Isles and the first use of metal tools (accessible recent texts on the archaeology of Stonehenge include Pryor, 2016 and Parker Pearson, 2023). Funerals are just one example of the early ritual behaviour that took place at Stonehenge itself, as evinced by the deposition of cremated human remains in a circular arrangement of pits around 3000 bce. Around 500 years later, a circle of massive sarsen stones was erected, a remarkable architectural achievement, yes, but also notable in ritual terms for how the trilithons frame the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset as well as how one looks out into the landscape or back into the stone circle. The sarsen circle and other architectural features, including a circle of smaller bluestones, also influence how people move around the site, in particular facilitating circular movement. It is likely that only certain people were permitted to access the interior of the monument on certain ritual occasions, such as auspicious times of the year or during rites of passage (rituals surrounding key moments in human lives such as birth, puberty, marriage and death). The architecture of the monuments in the Stonehenge landscape and the places where they are situated indicate that the way people moved around and within as well as across the landscape was not random but partially structured, facilitating ritual performances. For instance, the way in which the earthen bank and ditch of the Stonehenge Avenue provided a ritual processionary route between Stonehenge and the River Avon shows how movement around the landscape was ritually structured. This ritualisation of landscape recalls the example of the Nazca Lines in present-day Peru that you learned about in Book 1, Chapter 1, where smashed pottery and panpipes suggest that ritual processions along the monumental geoglyphs involved celebratory feasting and music. Deposits of intentionally smashed pottery and the remains of animals such as cattle and pigs in the Stonehenge landscape are also suggestive of ritualised 9 Art in Action Plate 11.1 An aerial view of Stonehenge at sunset, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire. Photo: Karl Hendon/Getty Images. Plate 11.2 Revellers touch the stones as they celebrate the summer solstice at Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain. Photo: DANIEL LEAL/AFP/ Getty Images. 10  Chapter 11 Ritual feasting (Parker Pearson, 2023, p. 48). While they take diverse forms, rituals are a common feature across cultures, and art and architecture are often at the core of their practice. The Stonehenge landscape is particularly rich in prehistoric archaeology, but virtually all parts of the British Isles contain important prehistoric ritual landscapes. The next section explores the example of Newgrange, in Ireland, to consider how art and ritual are integral to another prehistoric monument. Newgrange offers a salient example of how, in the extensive period from prehistory to 1800, ritual was one of the main human activities which shaped people’s interactions with the environment, the making of artworks and how those artworks may have been used. Perhaps of all rituals, those which mark death are the most profound. Newgrange is a highly decorated passage tomb located in the Boyne Valley in the east of Ireland and dates to c.3200 bce, so around two centuries before construction started at Stonehenge. Passage tombs are a type of prehistoric funerary monument consisting of a passageway leading to a cruciform (or cross-shaped) chamber with three smaller recesses adjoined to it, covered by an earthen mound. The span of the mound, at an impressively large scale, some 85 metres in diameter, is seen in Plate 11.3. Cremated and disarticulated human remains, along with certain objects, were deposited in the chambers. Archaeologists broadly agree that, as Newgrange is a funerary monument, the art found there must at least in part relate to rituals concerning the dead and their transformation into ancestors. This in turn would have had transformative effects on the living (Bradley, 1989; Lewis-Williams and Dowson, 1993; Dronfield, 1996; Wallis, 2014). So how did people interact with this monument through rituals, and particularly through rituals associated with burial? While we cannot know precisely how funerary rituals were conducted at Newgrange, the location of the monument in the landscape, the structure of the megalithic architecture, and the character and siting of the artworks all provide evidence to shed light on how people might have experienced the monument. Returning to our earlier definition of ritual, the spatial, material and visual properties of Newgrange give a sense of how funerary and other rituals held there were structured as ‘an act or series of acts regularly repeated in a set precise manner’ (Ritual, 2023). Plate 11.3 Newgrange, County Meath, Ireland, c.3200 bce, early Neolithic passage tomb. Photo: Tjp finn. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International Licence, https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-sa/4.0/deed.en. 11 Art in Action Plate 11.4 Newgrange, County Meath, Ireland, c.3200 bce, view of the entrance with highly decorated entrance kerbstone (K1). Photo: Dave Keeshan via Flickr. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 Generic Licence, https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-sa/2.0/. For one thing, Newgrange is located on a prominent rise in the land, overlooking the River Boyne, as you can see in Plate 11.5. Archaeologists have proposed that the early farmers who built the monument identified this location in the landscape as a special place to commemorate their dead (Cooney, 1990; Shee Twohig, 2000; Stout and Stout, 2008). Two other passage tombs, Knowth and Dowth, are found near Newgrange, suggesting that this particular bend in the Boyne River became an important cemetery. The building of the monuments happened in dialogue with the immediate environment which was thereby physically transformed into a ritual landscape. You have already seen how, at Stonehenge, people seem to have moved from one ritual monument to another, often on prescribed routes. One processionary route, for example, was from Stonehenge along the Avenue to the River Avon. Similarly, at the bend in the Boyne movement around the monuments and in relation to the river seems to have taken a ritualised form prescribed by the character of the environment and its architectural framing and setting. It is not difficult to imagine that the spherical layout of the Newgrange mound, like the stone circles at Stonehenge, would have encouraged ritualised circular walking around its exterior, perhaps involving engaging with the artwork on the highly decorated kerbstones, similar to those shown in Plate 11.6. But unlike at Stonehenge, where it is possible to weave around some of the stones and walk directly into the centre of the trilithon circle, the only access point at Newgrange is a single entrance. Access to the interior may have been highly regulated, perhaps by a high-status priesthood, or only possible during rites of passage. 12  Chapter 11 Ritual 0 0.5 1km N Major passage tomb atto ck Other archaeological er M monument Riv e oyn r B ve Ri Dowth Knowth Newgrange Plate 11.5 Map showing the passage tombs of River Boyne Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth in proximity to the Dublin River Boyne, County Meath, Ireland. Photo: Adapted from Nash, G. (2018), ‘Palace of the Boyne (Brú na Bóinne)’, Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, Springer, Cham. The entrance to Newgrange is partially blocked by a highly decorated stone, shown in Plate 11.4. The chambers and 19-metre-long passage in the interior, as well as the entrance and kerbstones arranged around the circumference of the exterior are all highly decorated, as shown, for example, in Plate 11.6. The style of engraving, usually called passage tomb art, consists of spirals, lozenges and other enigmatic geometric motifs. It has been speculated Plate 11.6 Newgrange, County Meath, Ireland, c.3200 bce, view of Kerbstone 52 decorated with passage tomb art. Photo: Johnbod. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported Licence, https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-sa/3.0/deed.en. 13 Art in Action Plate 11.7 Newgrange, County Meath, Ireland, c.3200 bce, view down the passage from the main chamber at winter solstice sunrise, the shaft of sunlight reaching up the passage to illuminate the antechamber with its triple spiral motif. Photo: © Photographic Archive, National Monuments Service, Government of Ireland. 14  Chapter 11 Ritual that these patterns relate to astronomical observations, or to the markings of a tribal group or that they are simply decorative, but none of this adequately explains the full range of motifs, varied architectural locations of these enigmatic artworks, or their role in ritual. Visitors today pass behind the entrance boulder to enter the monument, but in prehistory those accessing the passage would have had to clamber over this stone and as such, physically interact with its rich decoration. The ways in which the tomb as a whole dictated how people could interact with it and especially access it, then, offer an insight into how engagement with this monument and its art are highly ritualised. Accessing Newgrange to perform funerary rites and interact with the remains of the dead demanded a highly tactile engagement with the materials that the monument is made from and the complex art with which it is decorated. Entering the mound, a low, tight passageway makes one stoop and brush against the stones, once again ensuring that people engaged directly, physically, with the megaliths and their art. The main chamber, inside which one can comfortably stand upright, only holds around 20 people at a time, reiterating the idea that only a select few were permitted this opportunity. Only those granted full access would have seen the striking sight of a shaft of light from the winter solstice sunrise creeping up the passage, to illuminate the antechamber with its elaborate triple spiral motif, as shown in Plate 11.7. This incorporation of the annual sun cycle into the architecture of the monument, reiterated at Stonehenge two centuries later as well as in other monuments of the period, suggests that natural phenomena, the world of living people and the realm of the dead were brought into active relationship during ritual observances (Wallis, 2013; 2014). The artworks in the passage tomb of Newgrange, like those found at Stonehenge or the Nazca Lines, illustrate how ritual behaviour brings art to life. In the definition of ritual presented above, you learned that it often catalysed change and this would be particularly so in rites of passage. Perhaps ritual access to Newgrange, encountering its art and architecture, and engaging with the remains of the dead, facilitated a sort of rebirth, furnishing the participants with ancestral knowledge. The climax of ritual has been described by the anthropologist Victor Turner as a moment of transformation when participants are both their old and new selves, before re-emerging on the other side as new social beings (an idea discussed further in Chapter 15) (Turner, 1973; 1974). At Newgrange, the ritual acts of the living brought the art, architecture and landscape to life, and in so doing the dead were, perhaps, woven into the land to become memorialised as ancestors. As this section has shown, the rituals enacted at many prehistoric monuments embody key characteristics of such behaviour, including the regularised movements of people in prescribed spaces to engender change. The importance of art has been emphasised here too, from the monumental spaces themselves to the inscribed surfaces of the megaliths. Additionally, this particular example of prehistoric burial rituals demonstrates that sacred and secular life were closely connected before 1800, and that ritual is a process that can blur the boundaries between people and the places and things that surround them, in a way that might be difficult to comprehend today. Yet this dynamism applies broadly across art made before 1800 and will be developed in the examples explored in the next two sections. These will shed light on two very important aspects of how art is used in ritual: art’s agency to invoke change and its vital role in creating highly emotive spectacles. 2 Ritual and the agency of art Before 1800, artworks could be understood to be transformed and transformative when used in ritual. In this section you will explore how, through ritual, art was frequently understood to play an agentive, participatory role in human life. Art’s agency – that is, its perceived power in people’s lives, as defined in the Appendix of the Module Introduction in Book 1 – is one of the most fundamental and most difficult things for a modern person to grasp. 15 Art in Action This section explores the agency of art in two very different examples. The first takes a closer look at how specific artworks play active roles in Indigenous societies, focusing on Taíno art from what is now called the Caribbean. In these artworks, people, things and ritual are interwoven, with highly transformative effects on the participants. This helps shed light on Turner’s (1973) definition of ritual as a process of personal and communal performances that actively change both performer and audience in some way, spanning physical and spiritual transformation (Csordas, 1996). The second example is about how agency was attributed to polychromed life-size sculptures in confraternal processions undertaken in the Iberian peninsula in the seventeenth century. As you will soon discover, both examples shed light on the human aspects of ritual behaviour: as a Taíno shaman (behique, bohíte or buhuittihu) sat on a carefully crafted seat, for example, or when the members of a confraternity carried a sculpture through their local streets. But, even more importantly, both of these examples demonstrate that artworks used in ritual were powerful mediators, facilitators or agents with the capacity to directly impact and transform people’s lives. 2.1 Taíno art in the Caribbean Art objects in ritual performances often seem, from a modern perspective, to be relatively passive. In many Indigenous societies, however, the things Europeans have labelled as inanimate art ‘objects’ are recognised as subjects. This means that they are understood as having their own agency and personhood and are able to act and cause change independently from humans (Henare, Holbraad and Wastell, 2007; Santos-Granero, 2009). This might seem a rather alien concept for us today precisely because we tend to distinguish rigidly between objects and subjects. But arguably not all of the time: consider how some of us value the perceived presence of loved ones in heirlooms or talk to and blame our cars when they break down, as if they are persons. In many Indigenous communities, this sort of animist-like thinking is more pronounced, extensive and understood as very normal. Remember how in Book 2, Chapter 8, you saw that San rock artists in Southern Africa recognised the rock surface not as ‘a neutral tabula rasa [blank slate]’ (Lewis-Williams and Dowson, 1990, p. 15) but as ‘alive and animate in some way’ (Lymberopoulou and Wallis, 2024, p. 99). The agentive, transformative potential of art ‘things’ is illustrated especially well by their use in Indigenous shamanic rituals, such as those of the San peoples. In the following section we introduce four striking objects from the Caribbean made by the Indigenous Taíno peoples of those islands, especially in the present-day Dominican Republic and Jamaica. Each of these four artworks gained agency through shamanic rituals that interceded between human and spiritual affairs, for example to ensure the fertility of people and crops, and to heal sickness as well as broken relationships. The Taíno peoples were agriculturalists (growing, among other things, maize, tubers, beans, squash and tobacco) and hunters who lived in timber buildings with thatched roofs in groups of up to several thousand people. Their society was led by male chiefs (caciques) whose authority was inherited through the matrilineal (or their mother’s) line of descent. Women were active at all levels of social life, within the full hierarchy of sub-chiefs, nobles, commoners and slaves. Sadly, these Taíno communities were devastated by colonisation from the fifteenth century ce onwards, with the majority of the population either wiped out by diseases introduced by Europeans or subjected by them into forced labour in gold and silver mines. As you have seen in other chapters, for example in relation to Wayna Pikchu in Book 1, Chapter 3, all textual records of Indigenous practices are therefore subject to European bias. Given this, any interpretation of Taíno art is partial although this does not mean we cannot learn a great deal about these objects and their purpose (see discussions in Rouse, 1992; Bercht et al., 1997; Stevens-Arroyo, 2006). As you have learned in previous chapters when considering, for example, the Nazca Lines in Book 1, Chapter 1 and Southern African rock art in Book 2, Chapter 8, artworks and other forms of material culture itself combined with surviving historical sources offer rich resources for interpretation. 16  Chapter 11 Ritual Plate 11.8 Unrecorded sculptor, ‘Three-pointer’ Plate 11.9 Unrecorded sculptor, ‘Three-pointer’ cemi or zemi with engraving cemi or zemi with engraving depicting a snake depicting a snake (side view), unknown date, stone, height 15 cm, length 17 cm. (front view), unknown date, stone, height 15 cm, Museo Arqueológico Regional Altos de Chavón, La Romana. Photo: © Dirk Bakker/ length 17 cm. Museo Arqueológico Regional Altos Bridgeman Images. de Chavón, La Romana. Photo: © Dirk Bakker/ Bridgeman Images. The first Taíno object explored here is a small, portable stone sculpture reproduced in Plates 11.8 and 11.9 and known somewhat unimaginatively as a ‘three-pointer’ because of its shape (McGinnis, 1997, p. 92). This example has a ‘wrapped snake’ motif with a skull-like reptilian face at one end and a dog-like face at the other which morphs into a pair of human legs straddling the sculpture (McGinnis, 1997, p. 101). The three-pointer is part of a group of objects known in the extinct Taíno language, which hybridised with Spanish, as zemis or cemis – the material containers of life force or spirit associated with ancestors, spirits of the land and deities, all of which seem to fuse together in the form of this three-pointer. Displayed today as art objects in museums, this and other zemis originally would have been understood as a subject or person, able to act and have effects, with some of the rituals surrounding them concerned with controlling fertility, childbirth and weather. This signals the varied role of agency in a ritual context, with objects recognised as subjects, as animate persons, in ways that can be compared to certain Yorùbá artworks from West Africa, as discussed in Chapter 14. Snakes, with their ability to shed skin and move between land and water, are regarded across Indigenous cultures of Central and South America as powerful creatures; this was the case of the Mexica rattlesnake you encountered in Book 2, Chapter 6. Snakes were allied to shamans who could, with the assistance of their snake helpers, negotiate between the worlds of humans and other-than-human beings including plants, animals and ancestors. To do so required shamans to ritually purify themselves, and the Taíno made finely carved vomiting spatulas, vomitivos, for this purpose. Vomiting is valued differently across cultures, so while it might seem an unpleasant experience today, the enduring view across many Indigenous communities of the Americas is that vomiting, as an integral part of ritual practice, offers an ideal way to rid the body of impurities and gain a fresh perspective (Harvey and Wallis, 2016, pp. 256–257). Vomitivos like the ones shown in Plates 11.10a and 11.11 are now prized museum pieces, albeit passive and objectified in collection displays, but in Taíno shamanic rituals they were originally highly active artworks. 17 Art in Action Plate 11.10a Unrecorded Taíno maker, vomitivo (spatula), Plate 11.10b Unrecorded Taíno maker, detail of vomitivo (spatula), c.1200–1500, carved wood, 42 × 4 × 4 cm, Dominican Republic. c.1200–1500, carved wood, 42 × 4 × 4 cm, Dominican Republic. Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, Paris, 70.2008.37.1. Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, Paris, 70.2008.37.1. Photo: © Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, Dist. Photo: © Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn/Michel Urtado/Thierry Ollivier. GrandPalaisRmn/Michel Urtado/Thierry Ollivier. A shaman would have slid the smooth wooden or bone spatula down his throat to induce vomiting, in a striking example of the highly visceral dynamic between artworks and human bodies in many Indigenous communities and their rituals. In one example, the wooden spatula bears a carving of a zemi putting his own hand into his mouth to induce vomiting, mimicking the very same shamanic ritual purification that the object enables (Plates 11.10a and 11.10b). In Plate 11.11, the wood is carved into the head of a lizard, a 18  Chapter 11 Ritual Plate 11.11 Unrecorded Taíno maker, vomitivo (spatula), c.1200–1400, carved bone, 3 × 3 × 16 cm, Dominican Republic. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1982.48.4. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Purchase, Mary R. Morgan, Mary O’Boyle II and Mr. and Mrs. Frederick E. Landmann Gifts; The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller and Bequest of Nelson A. Rockefeller, by exchange, and Gift of Nathan Cummings, by exchange, 1982. reptile which, like a snake, sheds its skin, emphasising the importance of transformation in the purification ceremony. As these artworks are small, perhaps only the shamans themselves and their assistants or apprentices would have been able to appreciate the intricacy and significance of the carvings close up. What could be seen (e.g. the carved head of a zemi emerging from within the mouth of the shaman) and what was hidden (the carved lizard held in a closed fist) may have been important to the power and meaning of the ritual. These issues of clarity and obfuscation recall the way that the art and architecture of Stonehenge and Newgrange affected who and what is in or out of sight. As the anthropologist Victor Turner argues, a successful ritual transforms the participants in it (Turner, 1967). The vomitivo offers a compelling example of the transformative agency of objects in ritual, with the power not only to physically make someone sick but also for the zemi represented to thereby actively change the state of the shaman from impure to cleansed. Following purification, the shaman’s journey into the spirit world was enhanced by ingesting cohoba, a narcotic snuff inhaled from spoon- or tray-like receptacles, like the one shown in Plate 11.12. These items of ritual paraphernalia were often highly decorated too, with imagery likely to have been understood as playing an active role in assisting the shaman’s journey. In their drug-induced trances, Taíno shamans would rest upon a duho, a ritual seat. One example takes the form of a male figure crouching on all fours, adorned with various geometric motifs, as shown in Plate 11.13. The eyes and mouth are inlaid with gold and the face bears a stylistic similarity to those on the three-pointer and vomitivo discussed earlier. This formal similarity between the duho, three-pointer zemi and vomitivo recalls the appearance of shamans in their cohoba-induced trances, depicted in ceramic sculptures known as effigy vessels. 19 Art in Action Plate 11.12 Unrecorded Taíno maker, stand with Plate 11.13 Unrecorded Taíno maker, duho ritual seat, c.1292–1399, wood, cohoba tray, c.1028–1156, wood, 39 × 17 cm, 22 × 17 × 44 cm, Dominican Republic. British Museum, London, Am1949,22.118. Jamaica. British Museum, London, Am1977,Q.1. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. The example of an effigy vessel in Plate 11.14 shows a shaman seated on a duho with his eyes wide open, staring across the human and spirit worlds, his teeth clenched under the effects of the narcotic while he rests his crossed arms on his knees to support the weight of his weary upper body. At its peak, Taíno shamanic ritual was clearly transformative, in Turner’s sense, and this was especially so for those at its focus, whose altered states were facilitated by various agentive things, including cohoba and the artworks themselves. Conventional art-historical methodologies such as visual analysis and the ascription of ‘style’ can only offer a surface interpretation of these artworks, failing to get to grips with their agency and animacy. The agency of art objects in Taíno ritual therefore challenges European concepts of object and subject, as discussed in relation to other Indigenous contexts in previous chapters. That is, many Indigenous ways of knowing afford agency and personhood to a wide variety of ‘persons’ (human and other-than-human). 20  Chapter 11 Ritual Plate 11.14 Unrecorded Taíno maker, effigy vessel depicting emaciated shaman Plate 11.15 Unrecorded Taíno maker, effigy vessel figure, unknown date, ceramic and wood, height 17 cm, width 12 cm, depth depicting emaciated shaman figure (back view), 15 cm, Dominican Republic. Museo del Hombre Dominicano, Santo Domingo, unknown date, ceramic and wood, height 17 cm, A000679.48C. Photo: © Dirk Bakker/Bridgeman Images. width 12 cm, depth 15 cm, Dominican Republic. Museo del Hombre Dominicano, Santo Domingo, A000679.48C. Photo: © Dirk Bakker/Bridgeman Images. Besides all this, the imagery of skeletal or emaciated bodies and body parts in many Taíno artworks – such as the three-pointer zemi, vomitivo, duho and effigy vessel discussed here – disrupts another binary. In Taíno and other animist Indigenous cultures of Central and South America, life and death were not binary oppositions but interwoven (a point you will return to in relation to Inuit cosmology in Chapter 15). The iconography of emaciation displayed in Plates 11.14 relates to a shaman’s ability to move between worlds, transformed by cohoba and other things, including agentive art objects made from stone, bone, wood and ceramic, so as to commune with deities, ancestors and other beings. The example of Taíno art, then, demonstrates quite strikingly how ritual as a formal sequence of behaviours enables the transformation of the participants, with agentive art objects helping shamans to mediate between human and spirit worlds for the benefit of their communities. 21 Art in Action Activity 11.2 Allow around 20 minutes to complete this activity. Plates 11.16 and 11.17 show photographs of the front and rear of a wooden Taíno sculpture in the collection of the British Museum. The online catalogue information includes the following details on the object: Object type: figure Description: Male figure (now known as the ‘Anthropomorph’), possibly representing Boinayel the Rain Giver, carved in wood Production date: 1256–1300 ce Findspot: Vere (Jamaica) Height: 104 cm Width: 52 cm Depth: 15 cm Weight: 45 kg Materials: wood. While the language in the online catalogue entry is useful for conveying factual and technical information, this artwork was made for action rather than museum display. It does not satisfactorily convey the original understanding of the artwork as a subject rather than an object, as an animate being, and its role as a powerful agent of transformation in Taíno shamanic rituals. So, look closely at the sculpture, consider the catalogue information extract above and, with your newly gained knowledge of Taíno art and terminology, complete the following two tasks: 1. Identify at least one feature of the object which indicates its shamanistic qualities. 2. Consider how this feature of the sculpture would make it animate in the perception of the original artists and users. Discussion There are several features of the sculpture which are indicative of shamanism. With its rigid posture, clenched teeth and streaming eyes, the figure may depict an entranced shaman (behique) under the effects of the narcotic cohoba. The exposed skeletal vertebrae on the rear of the figure reinforce its shamanistic association with the spirit world of the dead, which shamans engaged with while in their altered states. The animate qualities of the sculpture are indicated by its role as a zemi, a material container of life force or spirit. The artwork would have acted as a conduit for shamans to engage with the world of spirits. In this case the zemi is labelled by the British Museum as possibly associated with the deity of rain, Boinayel. So shamanic rituals involving this zemi may have involved negotiation with Boinayel in order to ensure fertility and the successful growth of crops.  22  Chapter 11 Ritual Plate 11.16 Unrecorded Taíno maker, cemi male figure (front Plate 11.17 Unrecorded Taíno maker, cemi male figure (reverse view), c.1256–1300, wood, 104 × 52 cm, Jamaica. British Museum, view), c.1256–1300, wood, 104 × 52 cm, Jamaica. British Museum, London, Am1977,Q.3. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. London, Am1977,Q.3. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Taíno shamanic rituals offer one example in which three-dimensional artworks were transformed into powerful mediating agents, enabling shamans to communicate between divine and earthly spheres (and this interaction is something you will learn much more about in Chapter 14). In the following section we introduce a different, but related, example of agentive artworks, artworks that perform in a specific type of ritual, that of religious processions. 2.2 Animating sculpture in Holy Week processions In the seventeenth century, processions undertaken with life-size sculptures were incredibly popular devotional acts in the region of Andalusia in what is now southern Spain and indeed across the Iberian Peninsula. These Roman Catholic processions often took place during the central Christian festival of Easter and the next section is about such rituals. ‘Procession’ here refers to ‘the ritualised escort of someone or something from one place to another by some 23 Art in Action group before some audience’ and can also be called ‘ritualised walking’ (Latham, 2020). You have considered a diverse range of processions already, in the Nasca processions along the Nazca Lines in Book 1, Chapter 1, urban processions of Northern Europe in Book 2, Chapter 6, and Ottoman imperial processions in Book 2, Chapter 6. Clearly processions were an immensely important part of human life before 1800 and artworks were crucial to their significance. The processions addressed here involved the carrying of one or more life-size sculptures by members of the laity on elaborate floats before audiences along a set processional route. You can see this in a twenty-first century iteration of these popular Roman Catholic processions in Andalusia in Plate 11.18, where people in the city of Linares watch the ritual from balconies, their attention focused on the sculpture of Christ. As you will see, through this ritual act the sculptures became living embodiments of the divine, with the power to change people’s lives at crucial points in the Christian calendar. But first you need to know a bit more about these Andalusian processions. They were made for members (called cofradías) of local lay confraternities who commissioned, funded and then cared for their specific sculpture or set of sculptures during the year, for example by having them repaired or by commissioning new paintwork or clothing. During the assigned day of the procession the cofradías would escort the sculpture out of the church or chapel where it was normally housed. They would then carry it on a special structure called a paso; the sculpture would be transported around the city streets in this way on the shoulders of a strict and hierarchically organised sequence of people. This began with important ecclesiastical and political figures, followed by members of the confraternity itself. The group would move through the streets in a prescribed fashion witnessed by local people in different areas of the city. The route was punctuated, for example, with visits to the cathedral – the place of ecclesiastic power – and the residences of those with political power. Finally, the procession returned to the church or chapel of the confraternity, where the sculpture was kept throughout the rest of the year. Plate 11.18 Penitential procession with sculpture representing Christ’s capture performed on Maundy Thursday (Jueves Santo) in Linares, Andalusia, 2014. Photo: felipe caparros cruz/Alamy. Undated sculpture by unrecorded maker; this particular processional route was established in 1927. 24  Chapter 11 Ritual In Andalusia during the seventeenth century, these processions were usually performed during Holy Week, so the week leading up to Easter Sunday. It marked (and still marks) the various phases of Christ’s Passion, referring to his suffering and death. The first day of Holy Week is Palm Sunday, which recalls Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, where he was eventually captured and killed. Later in the week, Maundy Thursday commemorates the Last Supper (the formal institution of the Eucharist) and Christ’s capture while Good Friday focuses on his mocking, suffering, crucifixion and death. Holy Saturday commemorates his dead body and tomb, while Easter Sunday and Monday celebrate his resurrection. Every year during Holy Week the faithful relive these both painful and joyous events and meditate on Christ’s sacrifice for their sins during his Passion. As a whole, then, Holy Week marks the culminating moment of Christ’s sacrifice for the sins of humankind and is a time for Roman Catholic Christians to reflect on the health of their own souls. In particular, they should reflect on their sins and consider how they could do penance for any sins accrued in the previous year. The processions of Holy Week in Andalusia that we consider here were therefore crucial local rituals that helped the faithful remember and reiterate the core Christian duty of penitence. They were closely related to other similar devotional practices in Roman Catholic Europe at this time, but the grand format and highly elaborate artworks of the Andalusian processions were rarely seen elsewhere. A particular characteristic was the use of remarkably visceral polychromed life-size sculptures. You have encountered the heightened verisimilitude of Andalusian polychromed wooden sculpture in a private devotional context already. Plate 11.19 shows a half-length sculpture made by the father of Andrea de Mena y Bitoria, whom you encountered in Book 2, Chapter 6. Like the two examples from that chapter (Plate 6.11), Pedro de Mena y Medrano’s Ecce Homo was probably used as the focus of private devotion, perhaps in an elite patron’s private chapel (Bray, 2009, p. 129). It is now worth pausing to consider the behaviours and activities that constituted human interactions with full-length processional sculpture in contrast to half-length devotional sculpture. Plate 11.19 Pedro de Mena y Medrano, Ecce Homo (Behold the Man), c.1674–85, partial-gilt polychrome wood, 63 × 45 × 47 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2014.275.1. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, Mary Trumbull Adams Fund, and Gift of Dr. Mortimer D. Sackler, Theresa Sackler and Family, 2014. Sometimes identified as ‘Christ as the Man of Sorrows’. 25 Art in Action Activity 11.3 Allow around 10 minutes to complete this activity. Study Plate 11.18 and 11.19 and consider what kinds of human behaviours they might have solicited. 1. Begin by looking carefully at each artwork. What kinds of activity come to mind when you imagine their use in the seventeenth century? 2. Once you have considered the question, make two separate lists of verbs you would associate with each image, in whatever notetaking system you are using for the module. 3. When you have completed these lists, compare the two groups of terms and reflect on why your responses may (or may not) have differed. Discussion Each person’s list will differ, but in our lists for Plate 11.18 we noted verbs that were more physically active such as carrying, walking, standing, watching, moving, lifting, sweating and swaying. The second artwork invoked more interior states of reflection for us, including words like looking, thinking, feeling, kneeling and contemplating. On reflection, these differences in kinds of actions is not surprising given the different contexts of the sculptures’ display and function: one physically moved through space, the other was presumably mainly stationary. However, our responses could have been shaped by the reproductions of these artworks. Plate 11.18 shows an actual procession so it was easier to imagine the physicality of the action. Plate 11.19 was decontextualised from any space or use by people and it likely made it harder to imagine the bodily responses and interactions that the half-length sculpture would have invited, for example touch.  In sculptures such as those seen in Plate 11.18, artists made considerable efforts to represent the biblical figures with remarkable verisimilitude. However, these sculptures were not made to be admired primarily as artistic achievements; rather, they must be understood in the context of ritual acts that activated the agency, or power, of these artworks to expunge sin, and to serve particular social and political groups. As Susan Verdi Webster influentially argued, the polychromed sculptures characteristic of Andalusian Holy Week processions were considered to be animate during these performances (Verdi Webster, 1992; 1998, p. 58 and pp. 183–184). Throughout such acts of ritualised walking, the sculptures became the focus of intense veneration, entirely transformed from their habitual status as stationary, devotional artworks during the rest of the year into living and moving embodiments of the divine. People witnessing the procession in the city streets remained fairly stationary, standing at the sides of the procession rather than moving with it. Unlike the confraternity members who carried the sculpture or walked alongside it, the viewers’ penitence was facilitated through prayers they said when the animated sculpture arrived before them. The interaction between animate sculpture and audience solicited highly physical and emotional 26  Chapter 11 Ritual responses during the ritual including crying, wailing and prostrating oneself (Verdi Webster, 1998, p. 182). In effect, the animated sculpture mediated communication between the devout and God. It was a crucial part of the ritual because it enabled their prayers to be more effectively heard, resulting in a more efficacious penitential act (Verdi Webster, 1998, pp. 182–184). Artistic skill and verisimilitude substantially augmented the animate status of the sculptures during the Holy Week processions. Sculptors often underwent ritual purification and spiritual preparation before they began making these sacred sculptures, similar to the Byzantine icon painters discussed in Book 2, Chapter 8. The transformation of wood into the sacred image was closely connected to the broader European tradition of the Deus Artifex (God the Creator) discussed in relation to terracotta sculptors in Book 2, Chapter 7. In Book 1, Chapter 2, you learned about Shinto understandings of animacy in felled wood and that European understandings of wood could also imbue it with sacred presence. According to the art historian Christina Neilson, for example, this quality of the medium of wood was amplified when it was worked by pious artists (2014, p. 231). In fact, one Andalusian sculptor, Juan Martínez Montañés (1568–1549), was even called El Dios de la Madera (the God of Wood). But the sculptural attention to physiognomic accuracy and the life-size scale was taken further by means of paint. Colour was applied to the sculptures separately, in many cases by specially trained painters. Paint was used to conjure delicate translucent flesh, marred with bruises, threaded with veins and sometimes dripping rivulets of blood, to give the appearance of a living body. Significantly, the process of painting or polychroming these sculptures was referred to as incarnation (encarnacion in Spanish) (Bray, 2009, p. 19). By this logic, the painters brought the wood to life through the application of colour in a similar way to the Christian God the Father, who created Christ’s physical (or ‘incarnate’) form. Although the sculptors and painters achieved a high degree of verisimilitude, what really mattered was the ritual. This is clear from the fact that a notable sculptor was said to have run after his sculpture when he saw it in a procession, exclaiming that it was entirely transformed (Verdi Webster, 1998, pp. 3–4). By witnessing the ritual re-enactment of Christ’s Passion in Holy Week, audience members could begin to expunge their sins by witnessing his sacrifice and death in the flesh, so to speak. This process, of enfolding the present into the biblical past, can be sensed in Plates 11.20 and 11.21, which show two processional sculptures of Christ carrying the cross on the way to his crucifixion. Crucially, this biblical episode was itself a procession in which Roman soldiers, other convicted criminals, curious onlookers, and followers of Christ accompanied him to his death. Activity 11.4 Allow around 10 minutes to complete this activity. Look carefully at Plates 11.20 and 11.21. Consider the significance of the subject matter of the sculpture and its ritual use in urban procession. Then answer the question below in around 100 words. How might the particular narrative, of Christ carrying the cross, have resonated differently with the members of the confraternity carrying the float and of the audience watching the procession? 27 Art in Action Plate 11.20 Juan de Mesa y Velasco, Christ Carrying the Cross (popularly known as Jesús del Gran Poder), 1620, polychromed wood and other materials, 1.8 metres. Basílica de Jesús del Gran Poder, Seville, Spain. Photo: © Felipe Rodríguez. Plate 11.21 Procession of Juan de Mesa y Velasco’s Jesús del Gran Poder between Maundy Thursday and Good Friday in 2014, showing the sculpture being carried back from its procession to Seville Cathedral at dawn. Photo: Album/Alamy. 28  Chapter 11 Ritual Discussion The subject matter of the sculpture representing a group of people following Christ would have heightened the transformative impact of the procession, both for the members of the confraternity who carried the artwork and for those who prayed as it passed by them. Members of the confraternity could have identified closely with Christ’s heavy burden as they struggled with the weight of the paso (float). Spectators might have been aware of themselves as participants in the tragic event, perhaps reminding themselves to avoid passive looking and to align themselves with the followers rather than persecutors of Christ.  The importance of such sculptures during the procession was not limited to religion; the power of these animated artworks during the Holy Week processions also solidified and validated the social and political status of the confraternity members and the artists whom they commissioned. To understand this better it is useful to turn to the ideas of a French historian and philosopher, Louis Marin. Marin sought to identify ways that meanings can be conveyed in different rituals. In his taxonomy of the kinds of procession, the Holy Week rituals discussed here are ‘closed-circuit’ processions, in that they begin and end at the same place and, in so doing, tend to be used to stabilise a political system (Marin, 2001, p. 44). This suggests that in addition to their devotional functions, Holy Week processions worked as mechanisms for asserting social and political cohesion and consensus. What different meanings might the closed-circuit route have had for those involved in these rituals? The status of the confraternity and its members would be reaffirmed each year because of their privileged role in the event, together with the fact that the route begins and ends at their chapel or church. This works in tandem with the religious message as well: they are closest to Christ, facilitating the animation of the sculpture and enabling the expiation of sins that it promises the community. The authority of the Roman Catholic clergy and of the secular authorities would also be asserted through their position at the beginning of the procession and through the planned stops at the cathedral and palaces along the route. The deference and distinction between the lay confraternity and the official Church was important in this context because, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, papal decrees were issued that attempted, with varying degrees of success, to curtail and control confraternities (de Ceballos, 2001, p. 47). Finally, the Andalusian Holy Week procession would forge (or attempt to forge) a stable social fabric. In addition to expiating the sins of the devout witnesses, the procession would also attempt to establish social cohesion between members of the community and those in power and between those processing and those who witnessed the transformation of the sculptures as they were carried. Essentially, the salvation of one’s soul through the expiation of sins was only one of many changes ensuing from this ritual act, and through the powerful presence of the agentive sculptures. The Holy Week processions smoothed over wider tensions and anxieties, including concerns about the role of confraternities and of sacred images at a moment in time when Roman Catholicism had to defend its status as the true successor of the Latin or medieval Church, in the century immediately after the European Reformations. 3 Ritual, performance and spectacle In the previous section you learned about two religious rituals that involved art objects in active, participatory ways. While both of these examples were deeply embedded in religious life, broader social and political identities were also implicated. In this section you will continue to explore the agency of art in ritual, shifting to more secular examples. Specifically, this section expands on the agency of art in ritual by looking at how public spectacle and performance augment its transformative effects. 29 Art in Action In what follows, the term ‘performance’ is used to describe choreographed actions undertaken in the presence of spectators or audiences. ‘Spectacle’ is used to describe a large-scale, multi-media and multi-sensory event that must be witnessed by spectators for the ritual to be complete (in this sense, the Andalusian Holy Week processions were and still are spectacles). As we use it, the word performance refers not only to the doing of something with intent and the structured way in which it is done, but also to the resultant transformations of all those involved (Schieffelin, 1998, p. 199). The key point is that considering ritual as choreographed spectacle focuses attention on all those participating (actors, audience and material things), their active contributions to the ‘social drama’ and the varied possible outcomes of ritual action (Vitebsky, 2001, p. 122). This brings us again to questions of social status, hierarchy, identity and political power, and these key issues are clearly raised by the examples addressed in the next sections, which explore Viking Age art used in funerary rituals as well as the spectacle of elite feasts in sixteenth-century Europe. 3.1 The visual spectacle of Viking funerary ritual In the year 834 ce a Norse community living in southeast Norway conducted the funeral of two high-ranking women in ‘the richest Viking Age [c.750–1050 ce] grave ever excavated’ (Price, 2020, p. 198). As you can see in the visual recreation in Plate 11.22, a wooden ship 21.5 metres long and 5 metres wide was buried beneath an earthen mound overlooking the mouth of Oslofjord after an elaborate funerary spectacle. (The ‘before-and-after’ illustration shows half the ship during the funeral and half with it covered by the burial mound.) The highly choreographed performance included the careful depositing of rich grave goods with elaborate decoration. It also involved practices which would be abhorrent to many people Plate 11.22 Anders Kvåle Rue, The Burial of the Oseberg Viking Ship, illustration. Photo: Anders Kvåle Rue. The Oseberg ship burial as it may have looked during the funerary rite, 834 ce, Oslofjord, southeast Norway. 30  Chapter 11 Ritual Plate 11.23 Unrecorded artists, the prow of the Viking ship with Plate 11.24 Unrecorded artists, the prow of the Viking ship ‘Oseberg’ decoration, unknown date, found at Oseberg, Oslofjord, with ‘Oseberg’ decoration, unknown date, found at Oseberg, Norway. Photo: Karamell. This file is licensed under the Creative Oslofjord, Norway. Photo: Photo 12/Alamy. Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic Licence, https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/deed.en. today, including animal and possibly human sacrifices. It is gruesome to consider these acts from our contemporary perspective and personally I find it difficult to write about them. However, as art historians, we often have to check our own reactions to difficult subject matter in order to remain as objective as possible, so we can avoid imposing our own values onto the past. If we want to try to understand the Viking funeral, the evidence must be considered carefully in its original social context rather than judged from the present. From this perspective, careful examination of this remarkable example of Viking Age art and archaeology offers a compelling insight into how art, life and death were woven together through a complex public ritual performance. Many of the artefacts in the ship are highly decorated with a repertoire of motifs known as ‘Oseberg’ (after the modern farm where the find was discovered in 1904), as shown in Plate 11.23, and date to the first three quarters of the ninth century (you will revisit the topic of death and grave goods in Chapter 15). The decorations on the artworks have been described as similar to ‘a carpet-pattern with play of light and shade through the squat animal motifs rendered in relief on many planes’ (Fuglesang, 1986, quoted in Graham- Campbell, 2021, p. 51). Carvings on the ship itself include a coiled snake’s head on the prow, making the ship a ‘sea-serpent’, with friezes of animals including gripping beasts on its leading edge, as shown in Plate 11.24 (Graham-Campbell, 2021, p. 53). Richly decorated wooden objects inside the vessel include a four-wheel wooden cart with carved cat faces, 31 Art in Action Plate 11.25 Unrecorded artists, four of the bed posts with intricate ‘Oseberg’ carving and ‘fierce animal heads’, unknown date, found in the Oseberg ship. Kulturhistorisk Museum, Oslo. Photo: Adapted from © Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway/Kirsten Helgeland. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence, https://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en. which may relate to the Norse goddess of magic, Freyja; four sleighs, one of which has ‘fierce animal heads “guarding” its four corners’; and bed posts with animal heads and gripping beasts in low-relief ‘that writhe and interlace together’ (Graham-Campbell, 2021, p. 55) (Plate 11.25). The elaborate decoration on various material surfaces, comprising interwoven, writhing animal forms relating to deities, mythological themes and a wider-than-human natural world, must have provided a striking visual, cognitive and religious context for the burial ritual. Other artworks indicate the wide artistic frames of reference within which the well-travelled Vikings worked by the 830s. These include the brass human figure seen in Plate 11.26 sitting in a meditative, cross-legged posture, where the patterned cloisonné enamel torso recalls patterns used in ‘insular art’ in the British Isles in the preceding seventh and eighth centuries (see Book 1, Chapter 5). There were also textiles, like the fragment shown in Plate 11.27, such as expensive imported silk lining the burial chamber, a neat stack of pillows with ‘a single seed of cannabis placed puzzlingly between each of them’ and embroidered narrative scenes which perhaps hung from the chamber roof (Price, 2020, p. 251). The fragment in Plate 11.27 may show a religious procession of people holding spears and swords, some wearing costumes such as horned helmets and animal masks, all heading towards a giant tree from which corpses hang. As we shall see, there are strong visual connections between this imagery and the character of the Oseberg ship burial rite. The wonderful craftsmanship, striking visual expression and incredible preservation of the artworks warrant sustained analysis of their materials, making and formal qualities. But it is equally important to consider the ensemble as part of a visua