C.S. Drake's The Romanesque Fonts of Northern Europe and Scandinavia is a welcome addition to the formal analysis of medieval baptismal fonts, a corpus only sporadically examined since Francis Bond's seminal 1908 Fonts and Font Covers. Drake's work joins Georg Pudelko's 1931 Romanische Taufsteine and Folke Nordstrom's 1984 Medieval Baptismal Fonts: An Iconographical Study. Drake rightly notes that baptismal fonts do not command the attention of architecture, architectural sculpture, glass or even shrines and memorials, yet are liturgically critical, "associated with the great sacrament of initiation, and a symbolic door into the Christian Church" (xv-xvi). These are not "minor arts" or "decorative arts"; baptismal fonts are all too often overlooked with the closing of churches and their new functions as watering troughs and flower baskets (xvi).
The value of Drake's work lies primarily in its catalogue of these baptismal fonts. One of his stated purposes in this book is to "provide the art historian with pointers to specific matters calling for more exhaustive inquiry; the geographical and bibliographic data provided should greatly reduce the task of generating lists of fonts to examine and of books and articles to read" (xv). Towards this end, he provides an extremely useful appendix of fonts discussed in the book. The book is beautifully illustrated (383 images, all black and white, plus figure drawings) with many photographs taken by the author himself, attesting to his dedication and understanding of these fonts. Maps, the only illustration not included, would have been highly useful, particularly for those less familiar with the particular geographies. The material in Drake's book is worked into a series of categorical structures. After first dividing the works by material into stone and metal fonts, he further subdivides the stone work geographically into the fonts of Northern Europe (British Isles, Belgium, France and Germany) and the fonts of Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway and Sweden). The metalwork section then categorizes works by material (brass, bronze and lead) rather than by country, although the use of these metals generally was geographically clustered at the time. Any attempt to categorize baptismal fonts will ultimately reveal the problems of developing a systematic structure for this material; in Drake's case, the end of the chapter on Germany is entitled "Individual fonts" and examines some eleven fonts which do not situate themselves neatly in the earlier discussion.
In the introduction, Drake grapples with the issues of categorization, a thorny problem which he adeptly skirts by using both categorizations of the support form and the decorative elements. It is clear that Drake is soundly grounded in the methodology of scholars like Georg Pudelko and Francis Bond who pioneered the systematic studies of baptismal fonts as well as in the more recent iconographic analysis of Folke Nordstom. His introduction is the most synthetic portion of the book, in which he introduces the wide range of decorative motives with reference to fonts from different regions, drawing our attention to the iconographic similarities between the Belgian Dendermonde and North Grimston English fonts, for example. He astutely closes by pointing out where art history has worked in a vacuum, ignoring the period theology and its connection to the iconography of these baptismal fonts. In the later chapters, Drake relegates his synthetic analysis to a short introduction or conclusion, making it sometimes difficult to follow the connection between one font and another; one wonders if an exhibition catalogue format -- with images directly connected on the page to discussion -- might not have served him and his material better.
Drake's first chapter, on the fonts of the British Isles, including very useful sections on the little-known fonts of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, raises and leaves open some critical questions. "In place of the widely distributed major groups familiar in some countries, the British Isles are a treasure-house of major individual pieces and of small clusters which share so many common features that they must be the products of a single workshop or of the same itinerant mason...What is perhaps more of a puzzle is to encounter repeatedly just two or three pieces of a common pedigree; why was a successful design or iconographic programme not replicated in greater numbers?" (9). Drake's categorizations often overwhelm the material; here the section begins with square form fonts but moves rapidly into an iconographic discussion of the program on the Lenton square tub before moving into round tubs and their foliate, arcaded and symbolic decoration, and so on. It can be easy to lose sight of the form of the basin or of comparisons in iconography as one entry follows rapidly on another.
There are sections where Drake has dismissed scholarly discussion without reference. The Bridekirk font entry is a key example of this. Drake refers to the iconography of one of its panel scenes as a scene of the Temptation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve, noting in a footnote its present inaccessibility and source material for his descriptions, without also noting the substantial literature that offers a counter-reading of the iconography as the locally venerated saint Brigid (among others, see the entry in the work Drake himself cites, Angleterre Romane, v. II, [La pierre qui vire: Zodiaque, 1988], and the unpublished but accessible Ann K. Wagner, "An Investigation of the Twelfth-Century Baptismal Font in the Parish Church in Bridekirk, Cumbria" [MA thesis, 1996, University of Washington]). While one obviously cannot attend to every detail, this seems an area where inclusion would have encouraged vibrant scholarly debate.
The second chapter, on Belgium, shows the strength of Drake's research. Much of his discussion of these fonts is based on his Masters thesis, "Tournai Marble Baptismal Fonts of the Twelfth Century" (University of Essex, 1992). There is a depth of familiarity with the previously published materials and intimacy with the objects. He is engaged with the scholarly questions, particularly with issues of establishing a chronology of production (47-48) and attribution (59). It also shows in his discussion of the Mosan School fonts; his categorization of supports particularly shows the flexibility within the School. His discussion of a proposed restoration of the Dendermonde font (54) with the conversion and baptism of Saul shows Drake's familiarity with the iconographic conventions as well as the material object itself. Similarly, Drake's discussion of German fonts in the fourth chapter rests on considerable knowledge of the material issues involved. He spends considerable time on the discussion of Bentheim School, addressing Karl Noehles's 1953 groupings of these fonts for problems both of chronology and iconography. Drake is particularly interested in fonts which vary from the distinct groups of Noehles proposed; these fonts seem actually to form a distinct group Drake calls Berge III with the "main differences lie in the absence of the plate between the bottom of the bowl and the heads of the supporters, and the unique decorative frieze...drawn with very rounded curves so that it consists of a continuous chain of figures '8' lying on their sides" (77). In the German material as well Drake shows his continued sensitivity to material as he examines limestone fonts of the North-East and Schleswig-Holstein and the granite fonts of the North-West and North-East, and in the final chapter where he examines metal fonts.
Perhaps most exciting for English-readers are the sections on Scandinavian fonts. The richest studies of these numerous extant and richly decorated fonts has previously been almost exclusively in Scandinavian languages. They have been tantalizingly introduced in English works like Folke Nordstrom's Medieval Baptismal Fonts (Umea, 1984), with the attendant frustration that Nordstrom's is an exclusively iconographic analysis, separated from contextual and social analysis. Much more than anywhere else in the book, the Scandinavian section chapter introductions and introductions to font groups try to rectify some of this problem. In the introduction of the fifth chapter, on Denmark, for example, Drake provides useful general information on the number of churches retaining their medieval fonts, the period's import trade in limestone's effect on font production, an overview examination of the Danish forms in relation to other countries', and issues of chronology. His research reveals the unique nature of Danish production: "it appears that the Danish masons were very independent and the only evidence for artistic influence is in individual fonts, not in the groups" (104). The sixth chapter addresses Norway and offers current research on the numbers of fonts, their material and forms which reveals a significantly different picture than that established in the first quarter of the twentieth century by J. Roosval. The analysis in the seventh chapter of the Byzantios and Semi-Byzantios groups of Swedish fonts serves to remind us of "the strength of the Byzantine influence passing from Constantinople through Russia via Kiev into the Baltic basin" (135), a connection scholars of Western medieval art tend to forget or ignore. Similarly, he notes quickly but significantly the importance of eleventh-century missionary interaction between England and Sweden and Germany and Sweden, and its artistic expression in Skane through the twelfth century (145). Discussing the previously published literature in Scandinavian languages and building on it with recent observations of the material, Drake's book provides a key foundation for students particularly, providing a thorough introduction to the material.
One of the greatest flaws in the work as it stands is the material omitted. Drake apparently had chapters detailing the history and iconography of baptism which were removed from this work because of publishing costs. These chapters would undoubtedly have helped shape the context of these works, providing some of the understanding of how these fonts functioned socially and liturgically in Romanesque society. In the remaining text, Drake has chosen to concentrate solely on the formal analysis of these works. This creates noticeable gaps in the social history of a font. One example of this is in the material on the font at Winchester cathedral; Drake's entry is devoid of its patronage connection to Henry of Blois (as raised by George Zarnecki, "Henry of Blois as a Patron of Sculpture", reprinted in Further Studies in Romanesque Sculpture, Pindar Press, 1992). The entries feel both complete and yet somehow insufficient. Rich in formal analysis, they lack specific social context that adds to our understanding of the material.
Drake's book results in part from art history's reexamination of itself as a discipline. It accepts that the marginalized objects of art should be examined, not just for what they reveal about "more important" forms of sculpture but as a whole production. It shies away, however, from the critical social and theological history of these baptismal fonts, offering an analysis that is grounded only in the material presence of the object. Within a positivist tradition of cataloguing, Drake's book offers a solid introduction to under-examined material, an updated foundation undoubtedly needed for further work on these fascinating objects.
My thanks to Dr. Deborah Kahn for her assistance with this review.