Saint-Gilles, Laon, Germigny: iconology of a political representation of the Virgin in the «1200 style»

Abstract

According to Carl Schmitt's concept of the political, the specific distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy. In the Middle Ages, Peter the Venerable (1092-1156), the abbot of Cluny, was the first to conceive the Church as a spatial entity surrounded and contrastively shaped by the the nature of its assailants: Jewish, Muslim, and heterodox religious competitors. From then on, the Ecclesia perceived and established itself as a fortress constantly under siege, but interiorly illuminated by the Sapientia, the inner light of the Holy Spirit. At the same time, the « true social mutation of the year 1100 » (D. Barthélémy) that transformed the old religion based on the cult of relics into the sacramental "religion of new times" began to narrow the acceptation of the word Ecclesia to the clerical elite who had the power to invoke the Holy Spirit in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Through the Eucharist, the communicant was taken into Christ's mystical body and took part of the supernatural society of the Church. The devil, therefore, was identifiable in all his disguises by his constant blasphemy against the Incarnation of Christ, which is the raison d'être of the Fortress Church, and the condition of possibility of the Eucharist, and therefore of Christian society. At Saint-Gilles du Gard (ca.1160-70), Notre-Dame de Laon (ca.1190-1205) and Notre-Dame de Germigny (ca.1215), I propose that the Incarnation tympana with their claim of kinship to authoritative Antiquity ("1200 style") emerged and resurfaced as a key, but ephemeral, composition translating this ideology in the transition between Romanesque and Gothic.