by Gary Vikan
Henry Adams gave me a vocabulary for the ineffable. And as for “numinous,” a word made popular in the early 20th century by the great German theologian and Adams’ contemporary, Rudolf Otto, I later learned it comes from the Latin numen, “a nod of the head,” as if a deity were nodding to make his will known. Did Henry Adams ever use the word? I don’t know, but he and Otto were certainly of the same moment and spirit. The medieval world as Henry Adams evoked it offered me a compelling spiritual message beyond the Titian in the National Geographic. It was more than an inviting window onto another place, far from Fosston, it was a source of spiritual nourishment. It had what the classical music had offered me that I heard between midnight and dawn from the station in Chicago.
I discovered that if I took every art history course available at Carleton over the next eighteen months, I could graduate as a bona fide major at the end of my junior year. It all happened that fast: after those two false starts in science and music, I was suddenly on the art-history superhighway. I had never seen Carleton before I arrived as a freshman, and I had never been to Princeton before the day in September 1967 when I arrived at the age of twenty as a first-year graduate student. I chose Princeton because I knew Jimmy Stewart had gone there and because pictures of Nassau Hall showed that it was covered with ivy. I took the notion of Ivy League very literally.
HENRY ADAMS WAS NOT ON ANYONE’S syllabus at Princeton, where our job as graduate students was to research, discover, and argue our thesis—not to feel and emote. We were in the business of creating knowledge. At first I struggled, thinking that the more footnotes I included the better the paper. But in the spring of my first year in Bob Koch’s graduate seminar on late medieval typology, the pairing of Old Testament heroes and events with their New Testament “types,” I became an authentic graduate student.
My research topic was an exquisite little painting of the Annunciation by Jan van Eyck in the National Gallery that shows the Virgin Mary standing with the Archangel Gabriel in a miniature Romanesque church. The tile floor beneath them has scenes from the Old Testament, mostly from the life of the supernaturally strong, longhaired Samson. I waded through a millennium of obscure Latin medieval texts for weeks in the library of the Princeton Theological Seminary to construct a dense web of connections between Samson’s story and stories of the Virgin Mary—who, in the painting, is literally standing on her hairy Old Testament “antetype.”
I presented my findings on a beautiful Saturday morning in March 1968 in the graduate seminar room in Marquand Library. Sweet praise poured forth from all sides when I had finished, and then Bob Koch offered me the prospect of the ultimate acknowledgment: “You must show your work to Panofsky.” By then I knew two important truths: the first was that the top historian of later medieval and early Renaissance art in the world was the German-Jewish émigré Erwin Panofsky, who was at The Institute for Advanced Study just beyond the Graduate College on the outskirts of Princeton; and the second was that Panofsky had a tradition of anointing the star graduate student in each class with the gift of one of his books. What could be more wonderful than to be so ordained?
But my joyous delirium was brief. As I walked out of the seminar room and turned the corner toward our study rooms, one of my fellow students ran up to say: “Have you heard? Panofsky just died.” There was probably a lesson in this, and I pondered exactly what it was. I do know, though, that it never crossed my mind to drive down Highway 95 to the National Gallery to see that beautiful little van Eyck in person.
The successful graduate student becomes a master of mimesis—of imitating one of the senior professors. I was such a master, and my model was Kurt Weitzmann, the preeminent member of the Department of Art and Archaeology at the time and, along with the late Erwin Panofsky, one of the most formidable scholars in the formidable generation of German art historians trained between the two world wars. Kurt Weitzmann was “KW” to his students behind his back and “Professor Weitzmann” to his face. None among us would have dared call him Kurt, and I don’t recall that the junior faculty did either. He had arrived from Berlin in 1935 with joint appointments at the institute and in the Department of Art and Archaeology. KW was not the elegant intellect that Panofsky was, but rather a methodical archaeologist of iconography, modeling his approach on that of 19th-century biblical philologists.
The “Weitzmann method” involves painstaking analysis of narrative picture cycles in order to capture the hypothetical archetype. It is an almost quantitative method, for which the historical setting, use, and the spiritual import of any specific work carries only secondary meaning. I don’t know if I was aware of it at the time, but KW’s approach was pulling me still further away from that quality of medieval art that drew me to art history in the first place. And even if I was, it would not likely have mattered, since KW was now my world.
Kurt Weitzmann was hugely and appropriately admired by medievalists across the globe as the great scholar that he was. To be one of his students carried prestige, and I was proud of this. The sign of my status as a Weitzmann “made man,” which I received in my second year at Princeton, was the key to the green metal door on the second level of Marquand Library. Behind that door KW had his private office and the “cage.” The cage was literally that—a walk-in, wire mesh enclosure with a lock to which KW alone retained a key. Inside this cage were his personal notes and photographs of the hundreds of illuminated manuscripts and medieval ivories that he had studied all over the world.
These photographs and notes were precious, and we all knew that. But there was an even more important repository inside the cage in a big white refrigerator with a padlock. In it were the color slides and transparencies that KW brought back from the Princeton University-University of Michigan expedition of the later ’50s and ’60s to the Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai. (Saint Catherine’s is a 6th-century walled fortress in the Sinai Desert where most of the great icons of Byzantium are preserved. Its remote location meant that it escaped the devastation during the Iconoclastic Controversy of the 8th and 9th centuries when much of Byzantium’s early figural art was destroyed.)
Only those special people who had KW’s blessing could step inside the cage, an honor I finally received in 1972, four years after I got my green-door key. That locked refrigerator, though, was quite another matter: Its cool temperatures would keep those precious images from fading, and its padlock would keep them safe from tampering. And nobody got their hands on its key.
By the time I got to Princeton, Kurt Weitzmann had already had two heart attacks. One of them we understood had nearly killed him. So by then, on his doctor’s orders, he left the manuscript room at 10:00 p.m. before we did, and the ritual never varied. His wife, Josefa, would rattle around her desk shortly before ten o’clock, then pass by KW’s closed office door and rattle the coat hangers just outside. Then she would exit the manuscript room by the back door.
About three minutes later, KW would leave and lock his office, put on his coat, and follow in Josefa’s footsteps, eventually catching up with her and surpassing her by ten feet or so. They’d continue to walk this way until reaching their apartment on Nassau Street, perhaps a fifteen-minute walk from the library. But just because they were not in step did not mean they didn’t talk; while ten feet apart they kept up a constant, grumpy-sounding chatter in German all the way home.
The most earnest of KW’s students, and I was certainly one of them, imagined that they at age 25 or so were miniature versions of him—little Weitzmanns in the making. KW was, after all, the best of the best in the world at being what we were working so hard to be, and we idolized him for that. Forget the fact that by the time he was our age, he had written major catalogues on Byzantine illuminated manuscripts and Byzantine ivories, and that he had all the language skills at age 15 that we were never going to have. And forget the fact that in his mid-60s, and much constrained by his heart problems, he could still outwork us. No children, no pets, no car, no cooking, no TV, no football game
s—just work and more work. And somehow we aspired toward that life.
IN MAY 1973, I WAS anxiously awaiting the first review of my first exhibition: Illuminated Greek Manuscripts from American Collections. Much had changed in my life in the five years since the day in the spring of 1968 when Erwin Panofsky died. I had become a Weitzmann disciple, and then one of his star students. And like all Princeton graduate art historians of that time, I had earned my research year abroad, and I took this in 1970–1971.
Upon returning to Princeton, I married Elana Klausner, a graduate student in French and Russian in the Department of Comparative Literature. Elana’s background could not have differed more profoundly from my own. Her parents were both from Vilnius. Her mother’s side perished in the Holocaust while most of her father’s family emigrated to Israel in the ’30s. Her parents, Isaac and Anna Klausner, were among the last Jews to leave France, by way of Marseille and Casablanca, in May 1942. Their first-born, Edmond, who was three at the time, was a Manhattan psychiatrist and a gifted jazz pianist when I met him in 1969. No doubt some of the Klausner attraction partook in the same package of exotica that earlier drew me to the National Geographic, WBBM, and Nassau Hall. In any event, when we married in September, 1971, I left the last vestige of Lutheranism behind and became a Jewish convert.
It was lucky for me that my arrival back at Princeton, post-fellowship and in need of a job, coincided with KW’s decision to retire after his work of four decades. The official date was to be the end of the 1973 academic year, but KW and the department had a plan to celebrate this milestone in his career that required that someone be hired in the fall of 1971 to implement this. And that someone turned out to be me. There would be an exhibition of illuminated Greek manuscripts at the Princeton University Art Museum, accompanied by a scholarly catalogue written by KW’s students with me working as coordinator and editor. KW could not have guessed that by giving me my first exhibition, he was inviting me to draw a comparison between that very exciting public world and the insular scholarly world that he inhabited, and to make a choice.
I found that this exhibition project suited me perfectly. I liked the excitement of the printing deadline and the public opening, I loved the collaboration with my fellow students, and I was eager to discover what the reaction would be to our work. At the time this seemed to us all to be innovative and full of scholarly import and potential public impact. I remember vividly and fondly the early morning drive up to Stinehour Press, across the Tappan Zee Bridge in southern Connecticut, with a rare Byzantine manuscript put at risk in the trunk of my chronically overheating MGB, in order for me to do a color check for the catalogue’s cover illustration. I loved the entire tool kit of art exhibitions—the catalogue design, the labels, the casework, and even the lighting—and I liked to write without footnotes for an audience that was not confined to PhDs.
But I also quickly became acquainted with the post-opening let down that I never really got used to. After the festivities of the opening, with the fancy dinner at the Princeton Faculty Club and the drunken after party at the Nassau Inn, things pretty much fell silent, and nothing happened. The museum staff moved on to the next project. The Department of Art and Archaeology got back to the grind of being the department, and the exhibition space was empty—I mean literally empty of people. I had recently bought my first SLR camera, a Nikon, and every time I went into the exhibition space to take pictures I found it devoid of visitors. And those few who did come to see the show when I was not there were mostly academics who, in my view, were overly fussy and critical and who didn’t properly appreciate our efforts and, more importantly, our accomplishment.
A few weeks into the show I received a call from the museum’s PR department. Some justice, at last: The Philadelphia Inquirer was sending a reporter to cover the exhibition and I was chosen to escort him. I was ecstatic and remember the tour vividly. I stopped at every case and had something weighty to say about all sixty-seven items displayed, even though in retrospect I think it was likely that to this reporter, as to almost any non-initiate in things Byzantine, those wrinkly parchment books with their small, badly-damaged miniature paintings must all have looked pretty much the same.
But no matter; at the time I thought of myself as every bit the equal of any senior curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Illuminated Greek Manuscripts as a blockbuster in the making. I must say, I found the reporter annoyingly passive. I asked when I should look for the review. Within the next several days, he said, and then he was gone. There was no follow-up call; nor was there any fact-checking. I was too naive to recognize this as ominous.
In those days there was a drugstore on Nassau Street opposite the university, just west of the great iron gates in front of Nassau Hall, where faculty and students could pick up The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Philadelphia Inquirer first thing each morning. It was no more than three days before I started to troll the drugstore as I waited for the arrival of the Philadelphia bus with its precious cargo. I would intercept the packet of newspapers on the sidewalk, pull out a copy before the wrapping was cut, and run in to pay for it. I learned very quickly just to flip to the arts section, and if I found nothing in the first two pages of that section, the whole newspaper went into the trash.
This went on for several days before I figured out that all I needed to do was to open the paper and check the art section which, if still missing my review, would go immediately back where it came from, and I would be on my way. I don’t recall when I first suspected that the review might never appear, but I continued ripping into the Philadelphia Inquirer on Nassau Street in front of that drugstore until the last day of the exhibition on May 20th.
The non-appearance of the review was sort of like Panofsky dying just when I needed him to live. There was clearly a lesson there, and this time I got it. I was never again going to be part of a dud of an exhibition like that one, where any hope of emotional engagement with the works of art—of capturing and evoking the numinous—was snuffed out by heavy-handed scholarship. By 1973 Kurt Weitzmann’s padlocked refrigerator, the one that was still off limits to me, had completely trumped Henry Adams’ numinous cathedral. Now, I realized this. I knew that I must return to the mentorship of Henry Adams, and find a way to bring medieval art to life and to make it even more engaging than classical music.
Chapter Two
Sailing Toward Byzantium
During the 1974–1975 academic year Elana and I were in Romania. This came about because I needed a job, or at least another fellowship following my year as a Kress Fellow at the National Gallery in 1973–1974. My PhD research centered on a manuscript in Greek that had been written around 1580 by “Luke the Cypriot” in the Romanian Principality of Walachia (north of the Danube, south of the Carpathians). Luke was then the Bishop of Buzău, a town northeast of Bucharest. He was later given the title of “Metropolitan” of Walachia, which meant that he was the head of the Orthodox Church in that principality. Luke the Cypriot was one among many Greek scribes and ecclesiastics who took refuge in what is now Romania after the Fall of Constantinople, and there created what scholars call Byzance après Byzance. What set Luke apart was not only his extraordinary ecclesiastical career, but also that he was the founder of a major school of scribes who based their calligraphy on 14th-century Byzantine script.
In the summer of 1973, a Princeton friend who heard my story about needing a position for 1974–1975 had the brilliant idea that my dissertation work might reasonably include some fellowship time in Romania, just as his had included some fellowship time in Russia. I told him that the manuscripts that the transplanted Greek scribes wrote in Romania were all sent elsewhere, like to Mount Athos, Jerusalem, and Moscow.
And, in fact, the specific manuscript that was the focus of my PhD had made it all the way to Virginia Beach, Virginia, to the living room of Helen Greeley, who was the granddaughter of a US military man with a passion for old books, Colonel David McCandless McKell. I had photographed it there i
n September 1971. But my friend said this would not be a problem; there was an organization called IREX, the International Research & Exchanges Board, that made it its business to support scholar exchanges between the US and the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies. And they needed me because, as one might expect, the competition for time in Ceauşescu’s Romania was not very stiff, and they had a quota to fill. Mainly American sociologists went that way to study village life, and science and technical folks were coming this way. I would be a novelty as the first IREX art historian going to Romania.
So there we were, for most of a year, in Bucharest with not a whole lot to do but discover what Communism was about, make Romanian friends, explore the countryside, and write. Yes, life in Romania then had its absurdities, but I brought my own. Despite the close proximity of the subject of my PhD research to Princeton, I wrote my dissertation in Bucharest using the 35mm color slides I had taken of every page of the manuscript in 1971. These photographs were my only source for reading the Greek text, which had never been edited or translated. While Bucharest is about fifty miles from the Romanian town where the book was written, it is nearly five thousand miles from the manuscript’s present home in Virginia.