Towards a material anthropology of the effigy:
In a Lenten procession of 1497, Renaissance Florentines paraded through their city a standing figure of a Christ Child, his right hand held in a gesture of blessing, in his left a crown of thorns. The object of their ceremonial veneration was, in ritual terms, one of a vast series of such effigies used in worship. This particular figure by Donatello, now lost, was imitated in an array of different media - wood, clay, wax, stucco, and papier mâché - materials usually classified as ‘craft’ rather than ‘art’. Such painted dolls of clay and wood, often with elaborate and removable clothing, horse hair and glass eyes, were given to young women by their mothers to take with them either into marriage, or the nunnery, as aspirations of lineage or of Marian devotion. Surviving examples are strangely ambiguous, caught between the sculptural and ethnographic, to trouble the category of art itself.
This paper takes up the figure of the doll in a considered counterpoint to Claude Levi-Strauss’ focus on the mask as the site of cultural identities. Instead, following Aby Warburg’s study of kachina dolls alongside their related masks, I address questions of human surrogacy within the materialities of dolls as artefactual representations of human relations. While dolls are carriers of cultural heritage and social relationships, their materials are often quotidian – wood, clay, straw, textiles. It is the working of these materials in diminutive scale that endows them with surrogate presence.
As such, the doll raises inter-related questions between the disciplines of Anthropology and the History of Art this paper will consider. I take the case of the doll to consider the cultural agency of artisanal materialities, which I define as the social properties of things. The methods and materials of their making endow the doll with seeming surrogacy, through a cultural process of what anthropologists have termed viewer ‘enchantment’. It is their material composition which constitutes the centre of my analysis of sculptural ethnographies in the representation of the human form.
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Claude Levi-Strauss, La voie des masques, Paris: Plon, 1979.
Hans Belting, Face and Mask: A Double History, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.
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Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Les saintes poupées: Jeu et devotion dans la Florence du Quattrocento“, Les Jeux à la Renaissance, XXIII Actes du Colloque, Tours, 1980, eds. J-C Margolin & Philippe Ariès, Paris, 1983, 65-79, trans. as “Holy Dolls”, Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G Cochrane, foreword by David Herlihy, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1985, 310-29, drawing on Arnold van Gennep’s anthropological analysis of dolls in Manuel de folklore français contemporain, Paris: Picard, 1972, 1, 1, 116 & 1, 2, 516-17 & 581 on the use of child dolls in marriage rituals.
Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1980.
Xavier Bray, The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600-1700, National Gallery, London, 2009.
Roberta Panzanelli, ed., Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2008.
Genevieve Warwick, Professor of the History of Art, (University of Edinburgh to 2023, now pensionary) 2023 Independent
Genevieve Warwick is Professor of the History of Art and author of 10 books and some 50 articles on early modern art and visual culture. Her research has been funded by the Getty Grant Program, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Arts & Humanities Research Council UK. From 2012-17 she was Editor of Art History, journal of the Association for Art History UK. From 2017-21 she was a Major Research Fellow of the Leverhulme Trust. In 2015 she was elected to the UK CIHA committee. Recent publications include Cinderella's Glass Slipper: Towards a cultural history of Renaissance materialities, Cambridge University Press, 2022, and The Mirror of Art: Painting and Reflection in Early Modern Visual Culture, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, 2024.
Following Warburg's study of Hopi kachina dolls, I focus on 15th-century Florentine dolls made of clay and wood, often with elaborate clothes, horse hair and glass eyes, which were given to young women by their mothers to take with them either into marriage or to the convent. Somewhere between sculpture and ethnography, these dolls are artifactual representations of human mother-daughter relationships. I postulate that it is through a cultural process of ‘enchantment’ in the working of materials - wood, clay, straw, textiles - on a reduced scale, which endows them with a surrogate presence.