A year ago, I received a fascinating email from a stranger. The stranger was a man who had recently traveled with his wife to visit family in Germany and had decided to visit Bingen with the expectation of seeing the original paintings made by Hildegard herself in the twelfth century. However, the man had found Hildegard to be "quite elusive!"
The paintings were nowhere to be found. There were backlit, enlarged reproductions of her paintings. But the original, twelfth-century works of art themselves were just..not there. He went on to write,
I asked the one attendant in the museum where are the originals? Her English was not very good, and my German is worse. In response to my repeated questioning, she kept pointing to the area of these reproductions saying "there, there, there they are." But those were not them.
The man left the museum with questions and searched the internet with no luck for answers. Hence, his email to me. Having found my name associated with Hildegard, as this was shortly after I published this article on the most famous manuscript of her magnum opus, Scivias, the man emailed me to see if I might help sort this matter out and offer some information to his question: "where are originals of Hildegard's paintings?"
I wrote back with what was sure to be a disappointing response:
Dear ________,
Although I have not visited the Museum am Strom, I suspect the paintings to which you're referring are those from the famous Scivias manuscript, which was not painted by Hildegard herself but rather is believed to have been produced under her supervision some time in the 1170s at the Rupertsberg Abbey.
I'm sorry to say that this manuscript, which had been in the Wiesbaden Landesbibliothek until WWII, was placed in a bank vault in Dresden for safekeeping during the war. When an attempt was made to recover it, it had disappeared from that vault. Only one manuscript believed to have been produced under Hildegard's supervision (which lacks illustration) that was also placed in that vault was recovered. You can read the exciting story of its recovery here [in a great article by Jennifer Bain]:
Regarding the reproductions you saw: a number of photographs of the original Scivias manuscript were produced in the early 20th century, and it is likely that you were seeing prints of those, which have been widely reproduced. Alternatively, if the reproductions you saw were in color, then they were taken from a hand-made replica (a facsimile) of the original manuscript that was made by nuns of Eibingen Abbey between 1927 and 1933. That facsimile is the subject of my Modern Language Quarterly article, the full text of which I attach here so you may learn more about its production.
I am sorry to report the bad news about the disappearance of the original manuscript!
Not long thereafter, the man responded to my email with a kind and engaging note that thanked me for my explanation and expressed the deep frustrations he experienced in his efforts just to be in the presence of some important works of art, works that he genuinely thought he could see. The internet, he said, is awash in confusing information about these artifacts. This is no doubt unaided by tourism boards that are rather coy about how many of them are replicas.
In the year since this email exchange transpired I've returned to it in my mind to think about the stakes of replicas, of information and histories that become untethered from the reproductions that make up so much of our exposure to art and the artifacts of the Middle Ages that I study.
Rule One in the Intro to Art History class that I teach is: these things on the slides here are not the works of art that you're studying; they're digital copies of them. Incidentally, the most gratifying and annoying thing my students do after that is ask me for the dimensions of works of art when I've forgotten to include them on my slides. Gratifying because clearly my admonition was heeded; annoying because goddammit labeling things is a pain in the ass, and my neck already hurts from spending hours on my Powerpoints. Anyway, it's genuinely gratifying. But also my neck hurts.
I've never thought that interpretation or even enjoyment of art in reproduction can't be done. That would be ridiculous. I'd not be in this profession. But I do think that it's important to know and to teach people to develop an understanding of how knowledge itself gets made and lost when we come into contact with, when we look at reproductions.
The internet hasn't caused us to fall from a state of auratic grace. It's just accreted one more medium to the media, channeling media, channeling media that have always serialized originals (and yes, this precedes the printing press; for the love of God, please don't think this has anything unique to do with the printing press).
I love that this person reached out to me. I'm so glad he was appreciative of the conversation we had. A year after he contacted me, I'm still appreciating it too.
Here are two replicas of replicas of replicas.
