Envisaging Context

The question of “context” goes right to the heart of how historians choose to interpret images. Framing the question in terms of text and image, or, looking beyond textual sources, historical discourses, hardly begins to address the complexity of contextualization. Texts that refer to works of art themselves have to be read as responding to a pre-existing culture of images with varying degrees of polemical intent. Far from descriptive, such texts tend to be prescriptive. The historian’s recourse to images as documentation, i.e., little more than reflections of their time and place of origin, is problematic. Comparisons between different media and modes of expression—that are, by their nature, inherently incompatible—result in weak arguments constructed by means of analogies. Focusing on a few examples, my paper will explore what particular kinds of questions are raised by medieval images, and in what terms -- and how can those questions confront, if not answer, the kinds of questions posed by other forms of historical and historiographical evidence? Context, far from a self-contained frame, proves to be more akin to a house of mirrors.