In his book Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England, 1170–1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) (click here for review), Paul Binski writes perceptively about the complexity, quality, and originality of the sculpture of Reims cathedral. In his estimation, this body of art, from its corbels to its tympana, sets new standards for architectural decoration in subject matter, formal adventurousness, and expressivity. For the art historian wishing to probe Binski’s claims in greater detail, the sculpture of Reims provides a set of archaeological and interpretive challenges that are simultaneously compelling and daunting. One must look both broadly and closely in order to think more deeply about the intellectual and ideological contexts that inform the decorative program at Reims.

Donna Sadler’s study of Reims can be read, on one level, as taking up Binski’s implicit challenge to consider further Reims’s artistic achievement. Sadler’s primary focus is the remarkable assemblage of sculpture that was inserted into the interior of the west facade in the second half of the thirteenth century, making it the cathedral’s last major sculptural campaign. Her detailed analysis of the imagery is principally iconographic, and circles around issues of authority and audience. In reading the sculpture, she is simultaneously sensitive to its relationship with the cathedral’s other sculptural ensembles (specifically, the exterior west facade and the north transept), to the reverse facade’s conceptual affinities with written texts of the period (such as examples of the Mirror of Princes genre), to Reims’s status as the coronation church of the French kings, and to the reverse facade’s affinities with other notably complex arrays of biblical and royal imagery in France at this time.

Flanking each of the three western doorways, the sculpture of the reverse facade is set out as a grid, most often with single figures set into niches framed by ornamental foliage and beasts. The central portal is surrounded by seven rows of figures. The narrative here focuses on Anna and Joachim, Mary, and the infancy of Christ. Equally prominent are scenes of John the Baptist. These two main narratives intertwine and are complemented by figures of prophets that are not always easily identifiable by name. The two side doors are each flanked by four rows of figures with historiated archivolts above them. The figures in the lower rows are also difficult to identify, but they likely represent prophets, disciples, and/or the Elders of the Apocalypse. The archivolts over the side doors include Christological imagery paired with Old Testament antitypes as well as Apocalyptic scenes. All three doorways contain carved lintels with flanking figures on the jambs. The left and right lintels feature scenes from the life of St. Stephen, a popular figure in French church sculpture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The central lintel depicts additional scenes from the life of John the Baptist. The trumeau statue that rises above it depicts St. Nicasius (d. 407), the bishop who founded Reims’s first cathedral. The second chapter of Sadler’s study gives a thorough explication of this iconographic program; the book’s photographs provide details of many of the individual figures, and four color plates reproduce the central doorway. Nevertheless, holding the details of this complex sculptural ensemble in one’s memory is no easy task (at least for this modern viewer). One wishes that the book had included some kind of easy-to-read diagram of the overall sculptural program of the reverse facade. Readers desiring to view the entire scheme in a single panorama might supplement Sadler’s illustrations with the photographs of the interior of Reims at Stephen Murray and Andrew Tallon’s Mapping Gothic France website.

Another challenge in studying the sculpture of the reverse facade is chronology, as there is simply no reliable evidence for its dating. Sadler notes that scholars are in general agreement that the west facade of the cathedral was built in a continuous campaign during the second half of the thirteenth century. Without much further discussion, she dates the sculpture to the years 1265 to 1285. Not much is said about style to support the dating. Yet even if a detailed stylistic analysis could provide a tighter date for the carving of the reverse facade, the date of its conception—both as a novel feature and as a complex iconographic matrix—would still be uncertain. Sadler posits that the exterior west facade may have been planned as early as the 1220s. Thus, the reverse facade may very well have evolved conceptually and materially over the course of several decades, possibly spanning both halves of the thirteenth century. One of the strengths of Sadler’s study is that she is highly aware of the dialogic intervisuality at work at Reims. The evolution of the designs of the exterior west facade, the reverse facade, and the north transept may have mutually influenced one another in multiple ways over time, the interior speaking to the exterior, and the western facade speaking to the north transept.

These seemingly intractable questions of conception and chronology are not, however, Sadler’s principal concern. Instead, her primary interest lies squarely in the facade’s visual rhetoric—its iconography, its formal complexity, and its rich visual discourses of authority and rule. The first chapter of the book establishes this focus by looking at the cathedral as a whole, with an emphasis on the iconography of its sculpture; the imagery of the glass is given a secondary consideration. In this deft opening, she sets out the ways in which the imagery brings together concerns both local and universal. The interweaving of history and iconography makes for a lively and informative entrée into the visual complexities of the reverse facade.

In the subsequent chapters, Sadler considers not only the iconography of the reverse facade, but also how it might be situated within the political, intellectual, and artistic contexts of the time. To this end, she presents a number of interpretive optics for understanding the imagery. Each is grounded in either a textual or visual tradition. This framing—what might be called comparative hermeneutics—is perhaps the book’s greatest strength.

Across these readings, Sadler is especially interested in how the reverse facade might have “spoken” to the French kings who were crowned at Reims. She describes the verso sculpture as a “sophisticated piece of ecclesiastical pedagogy directed to the neophyte king” (69). In chapter 3 (“Mirror of Princes in Stone”) the most detailed consideration of this aspect of the sculpture is presented. Sadler is, I think, completely justified in looking back to the early Middle Ages to study the ways in which clerical authors circumscribed the duties of kingship and how these notions were extended by writers and artists in the thirteenth century. At Reims, Archbishop Hincmar (d. 882) stands undoubtedly as the seminal voice in this regard. Sadler cites writers such as Gilbert of Tournai and Vincent of Beauvais, contemporary with the thirteenth-century building campaigns at Reims, as thinkers who also used biblical exemplars to discuss the obligations and limits of royal authority. These comparisons are, to my mind, apt. However, Sadler often refrains from giving dates for the texts that she adduces as support for her visual analyses. A slightly more solid temporal anchoring would have provided a better understanding of how Reims fits into the history of art and thought in this period.

Chapter 4 circles around a cluster of interpretive viewpoints. To simplify Sadler’s terms, the chapter considers how form generates meaning. Treatises on preaching, rhetoric, memory, and chess form the backdrop for reading the sculpture. In juxtaposing the iconography with these different types of texts, the connections made are more homologous than causal. No single text serves as a decoder; rather, structural and rhetorical parallels are posited. The verso’s layout, for example, is examined as a grid not unlike the locational structures mentioned in ancient and medieval treatises on memory as being ideal for the placing of images into an organizational scheme. Elsewhere in the chapter, the sculpture is considered as a sermon in stone. It is likely that different readers will be drawn to a different combination of these hermeneutic strategies. I found the metaphors of preaching and rhetoric more compelling than those of memory and chess. Future scholarship in this area by Sadler and others would certainly be welcome, and may deepen an understanding of the ways in which the intellectual structures of the time informed the visual arts.

The book concludes with a comparative chapter in which the reverse facade is considered in relation to other major visual statements of royal ideology at this time—namely, the Sainte-Chapelle glass, the Psalter of Louis IX, and the thirteenth-century tombs of Saint-Denis. Sadler prefaces these analyses with a brief consideration of the Bibles moralisées as important precursors. As she points out, these books work to suture the royal reader into salvation history of the past, present, and future. This “elasticity of time” (198) can also be found in the reverse facade of Reims and the other visual works presented in this chapter. Here, Sadler might have taken her comparisons even farther. Arguably, all of the aforementioned artworks are undergirded by complex discourses of authority. Royal power is both valorized and circumscribed in these works, while clerical authority is given relatively equal footing in each. With the exception of the Saint-Denis tombs, each of the works uses biblical iconography in exceptionally rich, subtle, and modern ways to consider theories of rule in medieval Europe.

Finally, it is important to note that much of the value of Sadler’s argument lies in the details. Her specific interpretations of figures and scenes represented in the Reims verso cannot be easily summarized in this review. Readers interested in the complex intersections of art and thought in thirteenth-century France will need to experience this book for themselves.