Tabula Picta: Painting and Writing in Medieval Law PDF
Preview Tabula Picta: Painting and Writing in Medieval Law
Tabula Picta MATERIAL TEXTS Series Editors Roger Chartier Leah Price Joseph Farrell Peter Stallybrass Anthony Grafton Michael F. Suarez, S.J. A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher. Tabula Picta Painting and Writing in Medieval Law Marta Madero Translated by Monique Dascha Inciarte and Roland David Valayre Foreword by Roger Chartier University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia Originally published as Tabula Picta. LLaappeeiinnttuurree eett ll’’ééccrriittuurree ddaannss llee ddrrooiitt mmééddiiéévvaall. Copyright © 2004 Éditions de l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales English edition copyright © 2010 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. EExxcceepptt ffoorr bbrriieeff qquuoottaattiioonnss uusseedd ffoorr ppuurrppoosseess ooff rreevviieeww oorr sscchhoollaarrllyy citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without writ- ten permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Madero, Marta. [Tabula picta. English] Tabula picta : painting and writing in medieval law / Marta Madero ; translated by Monique Dascha Inciarte and Roland David Valayre ; foreword by Roger Chartier. p. cm. — (Material texts) Originally published in French as: Tabula picta : la peinture et l'écriture dans le droit médiéval, 2004. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4186-0 (alk. paper) 1.Copyright (Roman law) 2. Law, Medieval. 3. Law and art—Europe—History—To 1500. I. Inciarte, Monique Dascha. II. Valayre, Roland David. III. Title. KJA2438.I58M3713 2009 346.04'820902—dc22 2009023571 Contents Foreword:TheThingsandtheWords vii Introduction 1 Chapter1. DominiumandObjectExtinction 15 Chapter2. Accessio 28 Chapter3. Specificatio 38 Chapter4. Form,Being,andName 47 Chapter5. Ferruminatio, Adplumbatio 53 Chapter6. Factae andInfectae 67 Chapter7. Praevalentia 73 Chapter8. Pretium andPretiositas 76 Chapter9. ThePartandtheWhole 84 Chapter10. Ornandi Causa 89 Chapter11. QualitasandSubstantia 93 Conclusion 97 Appendixes 103 Notes 115 Bibliography 133 Index 139 Acknowledgments 143 This page intentionally left blank Foreword The Things and the Words Subtle and erudite, Marta Madero’s book is a contribution both to the history of the property rights to artistic works and to the history of ideas about material things. The corpus that she so meticulously analyzes is that of the glosses and commentaries that medieval jurists consecrated to the question of tabula picta, a notion inherited from Roman law and the terms of which are seemingly simple: To whom does a painted tablet belong? To the owner of the physical piece of wood on which an image is painted? Or to the person who made the painting on that piece of wood? By extension, the same question could be formulated in regard to writing and the parchment or any other surface on which words had been inscribed. It is thus possible to read Madero’s book in the first instance by placing it in the genealogical longue durée of the definition of intellectual property and its corollary, the construction of the figure or—to use Foucault’s formu- lation—function of the author. Such a reading finds, in the writings of the medieval jurists, the first formulations of a distinction made in the eighteenth century and articulated with particular clarity by Kant between the book as “opus mechanicum,” as an object belonging to whoever has acquired it, and the book as discourse addressed to the public and remaining the inalienable prop- erty of the author who has written it. In their way, the medieval glossators also address the possible conceptual separation between works, considered in their immaterial and continuing identity, and the multiple forms, whether simulta- neous or serial, of their inscription and transmission. Such an understanding of the book will see in the medieval distinction between substantial essence and accidental forms the opposition, dear to practitioners of physical bibliography, between “substantives” and “accidentals” and will recognize, as well, in the pri- macy given to the painted work over the materiality of the surface on which it is painted something like the concept of the “immatieral thing” framed in the eighteenth century to designate the transcendence of aesthetic or intellectual creations over their material existence. Such a reading of Madero’s book is entirely legitimate but may, nevertheless, be misleading. viii Foreword For in fact, Madero’s book introduces us to an intellectual world that is neither ours nor that of the eighteenth century, when the aesthetic and legal concepts that have defined our modern discourse first came together. The danger would be to subsume wrongly and unconsciously the reasoning of the medieval jurists into the categories we have come to accept. For the medievals, the purpose above all was to situate things—whatever they might be—within a logical framework that allowed them to be described, catego- rized, and placed in a proper hierarchical order. Physical evidence, shared experience, the direct perception of natural or artificial realities are inade- quate to this task because they are incapable of deconstructing and placing in proper order the individual elements that nature or human art has brought together into a single unit. Only juridical reasoning, which proceeds by way of establishing distinctions, taxonomies, and hierarchies, is capable of trans- forming the things before our eyes into manipulable categories that enable us to determine their real identities, properties, and ownership. Important consequences emerge from this, which oblige us to aban- don our habitual way of thinking about things if we are to understand how the authors whom Madero studies actually thought. For them, the painted tablets or sheets of parchment covered with writing are objects that can be comprehended only when one places them in the context of natural phenom- ena or material productions that pose the same questions about the relation between the parts and the whole, about the modes of uniting elements, or about the hierarchy of the matrix to that which appears upon it. I will leave to the reader the pleasure of discovering both the many subtle distinctions between things factae and infactae, between accessio and specificatio or fer- ruminatio and adplumbatio, as well as the multiplicity of opinions concern- ing the definition of these categories and the way they are handled in legal arguments. Madero’s analytic virtuosity here is astounding, as she guides her reader through a universe of classificatory systems worthy of Borges. In truth, these address a hugely difficult task: that of articulating the essential reality to be decoded beneath visible appearances. Madero thus takes the distinctions and categories of medieval law no less seriously than Yan Thomas did Roman law or Alain de Libera and Alain Boureau did Scholasticism; and her approach enables us to avoid two pit- falls. The first would be to connect too closely the thought about the things and legal procedural practice. The subjects of juridical argument are fully concrete, to be sure, as they concern financial transactions, the transfer of goods, and property disputes. But the construction of the categories that enabled the jurists to think about things is built upon a foundation of ancient Foreword ix and scholastic philosophy. It is governed neither by the urgency of the judg- ments nor by contractual relations between patrons and painters or copy- ists. The contractual matters that engage them take up none of the logic encountered in discussions of the tabula picta and focus, rather, on deadlines to be observed, payments to be made, and the details of the commission, such as the materials to be used, the iconography of the image, the typology of the writing. By focusing on the conceptual architecture of the glosses and commentaries rather than on the legal proceedings and decisions, Madero’s approach runs counter to that by which historians, no doubt bored by the formalism of legal studies, have privileged actual judicial proceedings, legal practice, and the adjudication of disputes. She by no means intends to deny the importance of such studies, based as they are on the archival records of law courts. But her purpose here, as in her other published work in French andSpanish,1 is to recall that in every period—and quite spectacularly so in the Middle Ages—law consists first of all in the conceptual description of acts, things, and people and that it is only upon this abstract description that legal judgments can be based. A second eror would be to think that painting and writing were being considered by medieval jurists in aesthetic or intellectual terms. In the dis- cussions concerning tabula picta, writing is always to be construed in its most material sense. It is inscription, ductus, and copy. It is never understood in the sense of literary composition even if the words écrire and écrivain have been used in French to describe authors as well as scribes since the fourteenth century. If the painting of wooden tablets has a different status, and one that implies the recognition of an original production, it is nevertheless not taken for a work of art. Its value is acknowledged according to the degree to which a rough material is transformed into a new object. The tabulapicta as well as the written parchment belongs to the world of material objects, and not to that of aesthetic creation or symbolic representation. The responses of the glossators to the question of the ownership of painted tablets or written objects varied from one school, period, or opinion to another, and Madero knowledgeably reconstructs the typology and chro- nology of these differences. She shows that however diverse they were, these responses were necessarily situated within a limited range of theoretical pos- sibilities, defined by the logic of accesio and significatio. The first determines which of two materialities joined in a single object appertains to or incor- porates the other, thus establishing the proprietary right. For some jurists, faithful to the Institutiones of Justinian, painting incorporates the wooden tablet, thus granting proprietary rights to the painter, while writing for its
The list of books you might like
