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Year: 2013

Notes from the field: materiality

Weddigen, Tristan

Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich
ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-85361
Journal Article

Originally published at:
Weddigen, Tristan (2013). Notes from the field: materiality. Art Bulletin, 95:34-37.



on this and the next earliest copy of the text, now in Doha.5

As a nonspecialist, I was struck that so little attention seemed

to have been hitherto paid to the colophon as a problematic

physical object. Once this documentary anchor had been cut

away, our group was able to speculate freely on date and

provenance. We followed Savage-Smith on the dating (to the

later twelfth century, perhaps?), but on provenance, judging

by stylistic considerations of the drawings, we were naturally

able to span the Islamic world, from central Asia to North

Africa. I myself rather fancied an Egyptian attribution but,

more seriously, I hope that further specialist study of this

important manuscript will start with a close examination of

the thing itself.

Oliver Watson worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum (1979 –

2003), in Doha, Qatar (2003–5), the Ashmolean Museum (2005–

8), and as the director of the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha (2008 –

11). He was appointed the first I. M. Pei Professor of Islamic Art and

Architecture at the University of Oxford in 2011 [Khalili Research

Centre, University of Oxford, 3 St. John Street, Oxford OX1 2LG,

U.K., oliver.watson@orinst.ox.ac.uk].

Notes
1. A. S. Melikian-Chirvani, Islamic Metalwork from the Iranian World, 8th–18th

Centuries; Victoria and Albert Museum Catalogue (London: HMSO, 1982),
44, no. 5. Interestingly, the piece had been earlier published as twelfth
century, in A. U. Pope’s notoriously unreliable Survey of Persian Art (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1939), pl. 1277d.

2. Museum of Islamic Art, Berlin, no. I.31/63, unpublished.

3. Oliver Watson, “Samarra Revisited: The Rise of Islamic Glazed Pottery,”
Hundert Jahre Grabungen in Samarra, Beiträge zur Islamischen Kunst und
Archäologie, vol. 4 (Wiesbaden: Ernst Herzfeld Gesellschaft, forthcom-
ing).

4. A. Soudavar, “The Concepts of ‘al-aqdamo as�ah� h� ’ and ‘Yaqin-e sābeq’,
and the Problem of Semi-fakes,” Studia Iranica 28 (1999): 262– 64.

5. Emilie Savage-Smith, “The Stars in the Bright Sky: The Most Authorita-
tive Copy of ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi’s Tenth-Century Guide to the Con-
stellations,’ ” in God Is Beautiful; He Loves Beauty: The Object in Islamic Art
and Culture, ed. Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, in association with Qatar Foundation and Virginia Com-
monwealth University, forthcoming).

Tristan Weddigen

Confronted with postwar movements such as Post-Minimal-

ism, feminism, and Arte Povera, which questioned and ex-

panded traditional uses of materials, and faced with an al-

leged digital dematerialization of contemporary reality,

materials have become a field of art historical research, to

which Monika Wagner has signally contributed. Textiles are

not only part of this new field, but, more interestingly, they

also challenge established notions of artistic material. A fab-

ric is commonly called a material. Being a technological

product and not a raw material, however, the label “textile” is

correct only in the metaphoric sense of designating anything,

processed or not, that can be used in the manufacture of

something else, such as clothes. But, raw material itself being

irrelevant to a definition of “textility,” and used to designate

equally wickerwork, written text, and metal curtains in archi-

tecture, textiles should rather be defined by specific tech-

niques of production. Then again, the techniques of assem-

bly implied in embroidery, in weaving, or in connecting the

World Wide Web are so diverse that we need to operate with

a vague “family resemblance.” Textiles are also often under-

stood as a specific medium of art. Yet this definition tends to

reduce textiles to material neuters and flattened carriers of

visual information—rather the opposite of the meaning con-

noted by the materiality of mediums that is the focus of

today’s scholarship. So, “the textile” is a hybrid under which

properties are often strung together—material, technology,

medium, and metaphor—and only rarely does it refer to one

of these in isolation. The study of textiles consequently re-

quires a wide range of methodologies, and it must concern

itself with a vast array of objects.1

The history of artists’ materials contributes to the study of

material culture. Over time, the appreciation and meaning of

materials and mediums can drastically change. The textile

decoration of sacred and profane interiors in early modern

Europe is a prominent case in point. Back then, textiles were

arguably the most important and expensive means of repre-

sentation, apart from architecture itself. With the end of the

ancien régime and the emergence of modernist aesthetics,

textiles have slowly withdrawn from interior design. More-

over, the textile medium was already marginalized in the

aesthetic discourse with Leon Battista Alberti’s rejection of

material in favor of pure artistic form, with the rise of Italian

idealist “disegno” theory, with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

Hegel’s spiritualization of art, and with the succeeding

modernist primacy of painting among the visual arts, which

contributed to its fading, both in art and research, until

today. Nonetheless, an emerging history of artistic materi-

als is not content with technological analysis, iconography,

or the history of design, but will probably move toward a

more comprehensive iconology of materials and history of

objects.2

A more phenomenological approach to late medieval and

early modern textile interiors shall be sketched here in order

to illustrate the potential of an iconology of materials and,

more specifically, the possible relation of materials to some-

thing as abstract as space. In order to look back onto a

vanished textile culture, we might start with its modern re-

ception. In his Arcades Project, left unfinished at his death in

1940, Walter Benjamin critically analyzes the late nineteenth-

century French intérieur. Referring to Theodor W. Adorno’s

habilitation thesis on Søren Kierkegaard, published in 1933,

which portrays the bourgeois flaneur and his inauthentic

interiority, Benjamin characterizes the Parisian apartment as

the surrogate of a domesticized public space, such as an

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arcade, theatrically costumed in fabrics. In Benjamin’s ac-

count, the upholsterer’s art fights against modern glass and

iron architecture, disintegrates architectural space itself, and

transforms it into an arachnean cocoon or uterine cave.

According to him, the prototype of the historicist dwelling is

not the house but the case or container (“Gehäuse”), the

silk-lined etui, sheath, or capsule (“Futteral”), which holds

the imprint of their occupants and receives the traces of their

lives. Benjamin’s Arcades Project, an archaeology of the bour-

geois culture that amassed and commodified all styles dating

before the Restoration, layers a modernist stance onto medi-

eval and early modern notions of interior space. Benjamin

might have also been aware of Adolf Loos’s article “Interior,”

first published in 1898 and again in 1921 and 1931, which

adopts Gottfried Semper’s anthropological clothing princi-

ple (“Bekleidungsprinzip”), as laid out in his Style of 1860/63,

and his notion of “truth to materials.” What matters most

here is that Loos demands the architect start by imagining

the emotional impact of the planned interior spaces that are

developed from basic decorative elements, such as carpets.

Only thereafter shall the architect conceive of a tectonic

structure to sustain or “wear” those interior spaces.3

Norbert Elias’s understanding of dwelling structures as

socially inflected and of spatial dispositions as materializa-

tions of communication structures and social formations,

which he expounded in his Court Society of 1969, has been

foundational to the sociology of space and to the study of

architecture. Still, while he stresses decorum as the expression

of negotiated and regulated social distinction, he says little

about decoration. More to the point, the attempt to link inte-

rior arrangement with social practice often fails to accept the

de facto multifunctionality of architectural spaces and their

ad hoc definition by furniture. Indeed, in premodern resi-

dences, habitable spaces or cubicles are constituted by lining

a building’s architectural cavities with fabrics. The alcove

appears as a mise en abyme of such textile spaces, a phenom-

enon that contradicts the Renaissance notion of architecture

as transparent geometric space. Thus, Benjamin’s analysis of

the historicist interior and Loos’s conception of architectural

space as perceived from within are useful for overcoming two

common approaches in scholarship: one that views tapestries

as autonomous, decontextualized works of art, akin to paint-

ings, and another that considers wall hangings as superfluous

froufrou disguising architecture. Instead, textile decor

should be understood as a most vital element of a cultural

“habitus.”4

A close reading of late medieval and early modern visual

evidence for textile interiors reveals some characteristics of

textile spaces, such as the temporal thickness and aesthetic

longevity conferred by narrative tapestries; the ability of tex-

tile ephemeral microarchitecture, such as baldachins and

balconies, to literally turn inside out, in a manner reminis-

cent of the topological model of the reversible “sock” de-

scribed by Benjamin; and tapestries’ function as portable

iconographic contexts or symbolic spaces fostering a typolog-

ical perception of a doubled reality and creating immersive

panopticons. The late medieval tradition of courtly “cham-

bres,” room-filling and often furniture-covering sets of ver-

dures, millefleurs, and genre scenes in landscapes, trans-

formed bare architectural interiors into loci amoeni, that is,

artificial paradises, as Aby Warburg made clear in his essay

“Peasants at Work in Burgundian Tapestries” of 1907. Such

verdures powerfully suggest the nonarchitectural, spatially am-

biguous depth and texture of nature itself. As places of

atemporal pleasures and unlikely encounters, they estab-

lished a “heterotopy.” In Michel Foucault’s “Of Other

Spaces,” a lecture delivered in 1967 and published in 1984,

the heterotopia is exemplified by the garden as a microcosm

and the carpet as a mobile garden. On the one hand, the

material and colored flatness of wall hangings was to re-

emerge later, as the modernist “carpet paradigm” of abstract

art. On the other hand, tapestries undulating in the draft,

folded, pulled back, or, especially, hung around the corners

of a room created a unique, immersive experience of visual

depth by warping an otherwise flat or relieflike picture, which

offers an alternative notion of illusion based on the materi-

ality of the textile image in which figure and support merge.

This medium-specific effect, which outdoes perspectival

panel painting, can sometimes be experienced in museums

today, but it was observed and documented already by the

Limbourg brothers with the greatest perspicacity in the early

fifteenth century (Fig. 1). In their January miniature of the

Tr̀es riches heures for the Duke of Berry, a War of Troy tapestry

is hung around the left corner of the room and wrapped up

above the chimneypiece so as to suggest that the turret of the

city wall protrudes into the room, that the cavalry enters and

storms the real space, and that it crushes the enemy into the

tapestry’s folds. Tapestries’ incongruous and material spati-

ality adapts to a plurality of moving eyes looking at nonplanar

and multifocal images.5

At the turn of the twentieth century, with August Schmar-

sow, Alois Riegl, and Heinrich Wölfflin, an art historical

concept of space emerges that is not based on architectural

and perspectival definitions and techniques. In combining

the “history of seeing” with the history of representational

techniques, Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form in

1927 still offers a master narrative for the history of visual

space. Panofsky describes early and high medieval pictorial

flatness as a Neoplatonic repudiation of the Aristotelian to-

pological notion of place, in favor of a qualitative, bodily

two-dimensionality, conceived as an immaterial fabric made

of light, lines, and colored surfaces. Late medieval art then

discovers the transparency of the picture plane and creates

boxes, niches, and textile baldachins in order to form a

pictorial and sculptural space for human figures. The transi-

tion from medieval discontinuous space to infinite res extensa,

from relational space (“Aggregatraum”) to absolute space

(“Systemraum”), began with the invention of linear perspec-

tive and was later theorized by Isaac Newton. As Wolfgang

Kemp remarks, pictorial space from Giotto to Jan van Eyck

can be described as a carved-out relieflike cavity, furnished

with figures and objects, constituted by their reciprocal rela-

tion, both spatial and narrational. Here, textiles follow or

replace the walls, fabricate alcovelike spaces, and are lifted to

open the view through the missing “fourth wall.” Early mod-

ern perspectival space, instead, gives a view through a con-

tinuum in which textiles, hung or folded, are reduced to

two-dimensional planes symbolizing the opaque materiality

and deficiency of pictorial representation.6

The fact that textiles defined the experience and idea of

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interior space from the Middle Ages well into the nineteenth

century, as Benjamin and Loos acknowledge, contradicts a

one-dimensional, modernist, evolutionary narrative. The re-

construction of a premodern “textile discourse,” which has

been obscured by the paradigm of perspectival transparency,

can profit from phenomenological and topological ap-

proaches, as sketched out in Foucault’s lecture and explored

by Gilles Deleuze, that emerge with the recent “spatial turn”

in the humanities and social sciences. Medieval and early

modern textile interiors testify to a notion of space as some-

thing material, opaque, sensorial, discontinuous, non-Euclid-

ean, folded, polyfocal, social, and topological. For instance,

Jan Vermeer’s boxlike, furnished, textile intérieurs have been

recently associated with a relational understanding of space

endorsed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christiaan Huy-

gens against Newton’s theory. Instead of a longue durée, bodily

understanding of space, art history assumes the break-

through and pervasiveness of the perspectival idea of space

since the quattrocento, defined as something transparent,

immaterial, neutral, rational, uniform, and infinite. In the

history of visuality, the instauration of the perspectival tableau

and the idea of absolute space have eclipsed an earlier, but

1 Limbourg brothers, January, from
Les tr̀es riches heures du duc de Berry,
1412–16, illumination on vellum, 113⁄8
� 81⁄4 in. (29 � 21 cm). Musée
Condé, Chantilly, fol. 1v (artwork in
the public domain; photograph
© RMN-Grand Palais (Domaine de
Chantilly)/Rene-Gabriel Ojéda)

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C
O
L
O
R



long-lasting textile spatiality, which contemporary art and

architecture, today, help to re-discover.7

Tristan Weddigen is professor of early modern art at the University of

Zurich (PhD Technische Universität, Berlin). He has published on

Italian Renaissance art and on the history of collecting. He is

currently leading the European Research Council Starting Grant

research project “An Iconology of the Textile Medium in Art and

Architecture” [University of Zurich, Institute of Art History, Raem-

istrasse 73, CH-8006 Zurich, Switz., tristan.weddigen@uzh.ch].

Notes
I would like to thank Gail Feigenbaum (The Getty Research Institute), Julia
Gelshorn (University of Hamburg), and David Young Kim (University of
Pennsylvania) for their valuable comments.

1. Monika Wagner, “Material,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, ed. Karlheinz
Barck et al. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000 –2001), vol. 3, 866 – 82; idem, Das
Material der Kunst (Munich: Beck, 2001); Monika Wagner and Dietmar
Rübel, eds., Material in Kunst und Alltag (Berlin: Akademie, 2002);
Monika Wagner, ed., Lexikon des künstlerischen Materials (Munich: Beck,
2002); Dietmar Rübel et al., eds., Materialästhetik (Berlin: Reimer, 2005).
See also Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in 15th Century Italy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); Jean-François Lyotard and
Thierry Chaput, eds., Les immat́eriaux, 3 vols. (Paris: Centre Georges
Pompidou, 1985); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Karl Ludwig Pfeiffer,
eds., Materialität der Kommunikation (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988);
Thomas Raff, Die Sprache der Materialien (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag,
1994); Andreas Haus et al., eds., Material im Prozess (Berlin: Reimer,
2000); and Michael Cole, “The Cult of Materials: Sculpture through Its
Material Histories,” in Revival and Invention, ed. Martina Droth and
Sébastien Clerbois (Oxford: Lang, 2011), 1–15.

2. Leon Battista Alberti, De statua—De pictura—Elementa picturae, ed. Oskar
Bätschmann et al. (Darmstadt: WBG, 2011), 235–37; and Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1990), 11–16.

3. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1982), 281–300; Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Konstruk-
tion des Ästhetischen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann et al. (Darmstadt, WBG, 1998),
61– 69; Adolf Loos, “Intérieurs,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Adolf Opel
(Vienna: Lesethek, 2010), 68 –74; and Gottfried Semper, Style (Los Ange-
les: Getty Research Institute, 2004). Cf. Christoph Asendorf, Batterien der
Lebenskraft (Giessen: Anabas, 1984), 89 –99; Philippe Ariès and Georges

Duby, A History of Private Life, 5 vols. (London: Belknap, 1987), vol. 3;
Claudia Becker, Zimmer-Kopf-Welten (Munich: Fink, 1990); Sabine
Schulze, ed., Innenleben (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 1998); Susie McKellar
and Penny Sparke, eds., Interior Design and Identity (Manchester: Man-
chester University Press, 2004); Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior
(London: Routledge, 2007); Felix Krämer, Das unheimliche Heim (Co-
logne: Böhlau, 2007); Markus Brüderlin and Annelie Lütgens, eds., Inter-
ieur Exterieur (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008); Karl Schütz, Das Interieur in
der Malerei (Munich: Hirmer, 2009); Karl Schütz, ed., Raum im Bild (Mu-
nich: Hirmer, 2009); and Alla Myzelev and John Potvin, eds., Fashion,
Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity (Farnham, U.K.: Ash-
gate, 2010). Cf. Alina Payne, “Notes from the Field: Anthropomorph-
ism,” Art Bulletin 94 (March 2012): 29 –31.

4. Norbert Elias, The Court Society (New York: Pantheon, 1983). Cf. Émile
Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press,
1968); Pierre Bourdieu, “Post-face,” in, Architecture gothique et pensée scolas-
tique, by Erwin Panofsky (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 134 – 67; Henri Lefèbvre,
The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); and Martina Löw,
Raumsoziologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001).

5. Walter Benjamin, Kleine Prosa, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1982), 283– 87; Aby Warburg, “Peasants at Work in Burgun-
dian Tapestries,” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, ed. Kurt W. Forster
(Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999), 315–24; Michel Foucault,
“Des espaces autres,” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuit́e, no. 5 (1984):
46 – 49. Cf. Philipp Ekardt, “Benjamins Bekleidungsmodelle,” in Visuelle
Modelle, ed. Ingeborg Reichle et al. (Munich: Fink, 2008), 85–98; Oliver
Grau, Virtual Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004); Joseph Masheck,
“The Carpet Paradigm,” Arts Magazine 51 (1976): 82–109; and Birgit
Franke, “Die Januarminiatur der Tr̀es riches heures,” in Die Bildlichkeit sym-
bolischer Akte, ed. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger and Thomas Weissbrich
(Münster: Rhema, 2010), 55–90.

6. Hans Jantzen, Über den kunstgeschichtlichen Raumbegriff (Munich: Beck,
1938); Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone
Books, 1991); Wolfgang Kemp, Die Räume der Maler (Munich: Beck,
1996); idem, “Beziehungsspiele,” in Innenleben, ed. Sabine Schulze (Ost-
fildern: Hatje Cantz, 1998), 17–29; and idem, “Raum,” in Metzler Lexikon
der Kunstwissenschaft, ed. Ulrich Pfisterer (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2011), 367–
69.

7. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, ed. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1992). Cf. Karin Leonhard, Das gemalte Zimmer (Mu-
nich: Fink, 2003). My note from the field here is part of a larger re-
search project conducted at the University of Zurich. See also the Textile
Studies series published with Edition Imorde, Emsdetten: Philipp Zitzl-
sperger, ed., Kleidung im Bild: Zur Ikonologie dargestellter Gewandung
(2010); Tristan Weddigen, ed., Metatextile: Identity and History of a Contem-
porary Art Medium (2011); idem, ed., Unfolding the Textile Medium in Early
Modern Art and Literature (2011); and David Ganz and Marius Rimmele,
eds., Kleider machen Leute: Vormoderne Strategien vestimentärer Bildsprache
(2012).

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