Ittai Weinryb has written an absorbing and stimulating book about the multivalent meanings of bronze in the Middle Ages and how those meanings are expressed in items created through the lost-wax bronze casting technique. At the outset, the author briskly puts aside the thorny problem of the categorization and nomenclature of various copper-based alloys, opting to regard them all as bronze for the purposes of his study. The book deals primarily with large-scale "monumental" artworks, which Weinryb defines as objects that in some way inhabited the public realm--generally things installed outdoors or placed on the exterior of buildings. Thus, with a few noteworthy exceptions, small portable objects are excluded while tomb monuments and the other bronze fixtures and furnishings found within churches garner little attention. Readers expecting a survey of medieval masterpieces in bronze will be disappointed: Abbot Bernward's column at Hildesheim, for instance, receives only passing mention. But to our benefit, Weinryb sheds welcome light onto the kinds of bronze artifacts to which art historians ought to pay more attention: doors, bells, fountains, and suchlike. He is as interested in texts as he is in objects, and one of the book's virtues is the judicious selection of written sources it incorporates, three of which are translated in appendices. The study follows a broadly chronological trajectory, beginning in the late eighth century with the bronze ensemble installed by Charlemagne at Aachen and terminating at Perugia in the 1270s with the Fontana Maggiore; Manno di Bandino's 1301 statue of Pope Boniface VIII in Bologna serves as a kind of postscript at the very end. Geographically, the focus is principally on Germany and Italy, with occasional forays into France and England.
The introduction outlines the book's main themes and parameters. It address bronze's particular characteristics and "the distinctive, almost enchanting, qualities" (4) of the technique by which it was cast. Chapter 1, "Making," explores these qualities further, taking as its starting point the austere bronze doors of the Palace Chapel at Aachen, which Weinryb sees less as a revival of antiquity and more as a potent display of material wealth. Medieval perceptions of bronze as an alloy--a man-made metal generated by a quasi-alchemical process--receive thoughtful analysis that draws on contemporary texts. These range from Alcuin of York's arithmetical problem devised around proportions of metals forming an amalgam to the inscriptions on Bernward's Hildesheim candlesticks, which allude to the alloy from which they were made. Lost-wax casting, "one of the most symbolically charged artistic techniques" of the Middle Ages (45), is subject to similarly insightful treatment. Weinryb contends that the alloy was "enlivened" by the act of casting and sees the process of forming an image seemingly ex nihilo as paralleling divine acts of creation.
Chapter 2, "Signification," extends the examination of the iconology of bronze by considering the significance of bronze objects following the moment of creation. An eleventh-century bronze reliquary decorated with arboreal scrollwork prompts an erudite (if somewhat heavy-going) account of how the notion of primordial matter came to be associated with the idea of the forest (and, hence, vegetal ornament) through the word silva used in the fourth-century Latin translation of Plato's dialogue on creation. The following section is more tersely argued: it considers Renier of Huy's baptismal font in Liège in relation to the Brazen Sea, the great bronze basin in the Temple of Solomon, the metaphorical connections between which are illuminated by a twelfth-century exegetical text by Hugh of Fouilloy (translated in Appendix 2). Circling back to Charlemagne and his legacy, the chapter also deals with the relationship between bronze and secular authority, but perhaps its most illuminating section comes towards the end, where the sonorous qualities of bronze are explored. Weinryb has very interesting things to say about church bells, the most common kind of bronze object in the medieval church. Bells were cast in a similar fashion to fonts but were made to be heard rather than seen; consequently, through aural experience, they reached a far greater audience than the other bronze artworks under discussion. Moreover, in contrast to the muezzin's voice calling Muslims to prayer, the sounds of bells demarcated Christian sites of worship. Thus, as Weinryb pithily notes, "bells construct communities but they also segregate them" (106).
The third chapter, "Acting," is rather more tightly structured than the previous chapter. It tackles bronze artworks after their completion, focusing particularly on how they "behaved" as apotropaic objects, for which Perseus's shield and Moses's brazen serpent provide obvious precedents. The author cites some fascinating medieval instances, including a talismanic bronze blackbird at San Zeno, Verona, and the bronze fly supposedly placed by Virgil above the city gates of Naples. Likewise, he examines the use of bells as apotropaic devices to ward off evil. The chapter concludes with the "audiovisual spectacle" and "lasting multisensory performance" (145) generated by the bronze objects that punctuated the cathedral complex at Pisa: the Leaning Tower's bells, the Cathedral's bronze doors, as well as the famous griffin above on the apse roof, cunningly engineered so as to roar or hiss in the wind.
The last chapter, "Being," explores the reception of bronze objects within their environments, with a particular emphasis on the sense of marvel or wonder elicited from their audiences. An intriguing section on automata, for which cast bronze was often used, argues that the Krodo Altar in Goslar, with its pierced side panels from which light and incense smoke would emerge, was "de facto a machine that performed pyrotechnics as a spectacle to accompany the Elevation of the Host" (156). Water clocks, like that given to Charlemagne by Harun al-Rashid, the caliph of Baghdad, are also addressed. The final section situates bronze objects in their public settings and considers how they engaged with their communities. Sets of doors produced by the twelfth-century caster Barisianus of Trani for which molds were reused and motifs were repeated provided "a pre-industrial solution to a communal need" (177) for the decoration of southern Italian church exteriors. Barisianus signed his doors and depicted himself on them, and although "the presence of the artisan, in name or image, is not rare in medieval bronze casting" (179), this phenomenon is not examined as thoroughly as one might hope. Weinryb is more concerned with making rather than with makers and interprets such proclamations of authorship principally as a means of establishing a brand name. The book concludes by considering bronze objects which were centrally positioned within communal urban locales, the ultimate instance of which is the fountain, which the author sees as a kind of utilitarian automaton, "a machine that enchanted the medieval spectator" (190).
Given his compelling insights about bronze's unique material qualities, it is puzzling that Weinryb does not attend more closely to the surfaces of the objects with which he is concerned. He refers frequently to the reflective qualities of bronze (e.g. 18-19, 30, 115) but assumes, rather than demonstrates, that surfaces (of doors, primarily) were polished to the degree that they became mirror-like. To be fair, Etruscan and Roman bronze hand mirrors are noted as precedents but supportive evidence for the polishing of medieval bronzes is largely buried in the endnotes. Color is likewise neglected. We are used to seeing bronze artworks with dark, patinated surfaces, with colors that range from reddish-brown to greenish-black. When subject to high polish though, bronzes (especially zinc-rich alloys) take on a color and luster that is visually proximate to gold, as shown--tantalizingly--on the repeatedly fingered left paw of Charlemagne's she-bear at Aachen (81, fig. 38). The implications of the alloy's potentially gold-like hue warrant more attention, as do those raised by the application of gilding. What does it mean when a bronze object like the Boniface III statue in Bologna (197, fig. 111) is covered by a layer of gold, when the metal from which it was formed is mostly obscured by gilding? Does it retain the varied associations with which bronze was imbued, so vividly outlined in this book, or does it in effect become a piece of goldsmiths' work, albeit of a scale unlikely to be ever realized actually in gold?
This is a densely written, demanding text but one that rewards the reader with innumerable fresh perspectives on the meaning of bronze specifically and on medieval materiality generally. The book certainly has much to recommend it but it is not without its frustrations. It would have benefited from more rigorous editing: the prose is repetitious in places; a few figure numbers in the text (176, 196) do not correspond to the illustrations to which they refer; the index is inadequate; the alphabetical order of the bibliography is muddled. Despite these mechanical shortcomings (which are surprising given the prestige of the publisher), the book's ambition, the originality of its approach, the richness of its arguments, and the verve with which it is written will undoubtedly ensure its lasting significance for anyone interested in medieval objects, bronze or otherwise.