Page - 24 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

aSSAF PINKUS24 are made, fig. 6), around 1400, for example, illustrates the customary inspection of the final sealing of the marriage (namely, the first act of sexual intercourse) through a window open- ing onto the marital bed. The couple, as shown by Michael Camille, are visible not only to the voyeuristic viewer, who spies on the scene either through an unoccupied window opened in the right wall or through the cut-away wall, but also to the two internal spectators who peep through a window on the left.70 These men are identified as the fathers of the pair or the notaries, who are making sure the marriage is being properly con- summated. Although for Camille the marriage- bed was a site of public spectacle in which the lovers proved their fulfillment of the legal union, the miniature posits otherwise: the spectators are not part of the intimate relations; they are not in the room but, rather, the room is pierced by peeping openings, excluding the viewers from the private sphere and making them voyeurs. Even if the private sphere was absent in the Mid- dle Ages, the explicitly voyeuristic representation could paradoxically either constitute privacy or, on the contrary, its violation.71 As is the case in Boccaccio’s novel; as is the case in the institution of the contemporaneous confession; as is the case with the praying St. Dominic, and St. Anne in her room – voyeurism, aural and ocular, appears as instrumental in late medieval devotional prac- tices and social constructions. Our own contemporary voyeuristic culture – to borrow Norman Denzin’s definition – is a social formation that has come to know itself, collectively and individually, through the visual apparatus – where people watch other people’s private lives in the media (for instance, in soap operas) but mostly care little for actually inter- acting with them.72 Late medieval art and devo- tion indeed evoke a similar experience. Yet the interaction with the watched, namely with the sacred figures, was more intrinsic. The viewers, as narrators on their own, who obtain temporary mastery and control over what they see, were encouraged to penetrate into the pictorial realm of pictorial narratives, to meditate, reconstruct, and internalize it through and by their voyeur- istic gaze. Similar to Sartre’s gaze, the late medi- eval voyeuristic gaze was manipulative, giving the inanimate imagery a history.73 The voyeur’s gaze McCracken (eds), Constructing Medieval Sexuality, Minnesota 1998, p. 58–90; A. Classen, Sexuality in the Mid- dle Ages and Early Modern Times: New Approaches to a Fundamental Cultural-Historical and Literary-Anthropo- logical Theme, New York 2008. 70 M. Camille, The Medieval Art of Love, London 1998, p. 140. 71 See for example M. Jones, Sex and Sexuality in Late Medieval and Early Modern Art, in: D. Erlach/M. Reisenleitner/K. Vocelka (eds), Privatisierung der Triebe? Sexualität in der Frühen Neuzeit, Frankfurt a.M./ Berlin/Bern/New York/Paris/Vienna 1994, pp. 187–295. 72 For a definition and investigation of the voyeuristic-cinematic society, see Calvert, Voyeur Nation (cit. n. 25), pp. 5–12; N. K. Denzin, The Cinematic Society. The Voyeur’s Gaze, London 1995, pp. 1–9. 6: How Material Things are Made, from Bartholomeus Anglicus, Livre des Propriétez des Choses, Paris, 1400, Wolfen büttel, Herzog-August-Bibliothek, 1.3.5.1 Aug.2 fol. 146r