MIXTURES

The first three chapters of this volume focused largely on examples of atavism in Romanesque sculpture, considering why artists embraced monstrous types that had long histories. I turn here to examine an alternative mode of artistic production, one in which sculptors departed from established pictorial types to create new forms of monsters. An unpublished twelfth-century capital in the University of Colorado Art Museum (fig. 27) is representative of this practice. On two of its corners the carving features beastly maws that spew tendrils of vegetation, which, in turn, entwine two monstrous mixtures of feathered wings, avian feet, hair, serpentine tails, and dragon-like heads that crane their necks as they bite into bunches of grapes. To label these latter creatures “dragons” seems somewhat reductive, for this nomenclature does not fully account for the morphology of these creatures, which varied widely in medieval art. Some examples have bird wings, while others are wingless; some have avian talons, others reptilian claws, and still others have no feet at all. Aside from the serpentine body, there are no universal features in medieval pictorial traditions that are consistently associated with “dragons”.

Several of the elements that comprise the Colorado monsters, such as the flame-like tufts of hair, have roots in the early decades of the twelfth century, when Burgundian artists developed a sculptural vocabulary of the monstrous at Cluny, Moutier-St-Jean, and Vézelay, among other sties. These motifs were soon adopted as part of the visual vocabulary of sculptors practicing in regions to the east, including at the cloister of Notre- Dame-en-Vaux, Châlonssur- Saone, and to the south, as at St-Trophîme, Arles. The ubiquity of similarly imaginative creatures by 1150 makes it difficult to locate the origins of the Colorado capital with precision, for rather than invent monsters de novo, sculptors creatively admixed stock elements in myriad ways. Such paratactic modes of representation have been identified as characteristic of twelfth-century monsters in art and literature, a contrast to the more synthetic modes of representation that emerged in the thirteenth century. Indeed, a wide range of morphologies characterize the “dragons” within the initials and margins of contemporary manuscripts, often the products of monastic scriptoria. In biological terms, these creatures might be classified into species and subspecies.