Henry the Lion and the Art of Politics in Northern Europe, c. 1142-1195

This dissertation examines a range of objects made in north Germany and southern Scandinavia during the second half of the twelfth century, advancing the new concept of “coercive form” to describe the political work of sculptural aesthetics in the period. It makes the case that the formal qualities of some sculptures were invested with political significance during a time when politics were grounded in the material and visual world and forms of compulsion governed artistic production. Writers, political theorists, and secular elites noticed this fact, and the dissertation draws on their jokes and poems in order to propose a new vocabulary for medieval sculpture’s formal properties. In a milieu characterized by rapid historical change—colonization, Christianization, class conflict—art increasingly modeled the processes that bound subjects into new social orders. Examining questions of figuration and scale, the first two chapters analyze monumental metal works erected at Brunswick and Erfurt, placing both in relation to the political administration of Duke Henry the Lion of Bavaria and Saxony (d. 1195). I demonstrate that large works of sculpture assumed the tasks of staking out sovereign centers and visualizing class hierarchies (particularly with respect to the legally unfree ministeriales who performed administrative labor and strove against proscriptions about the alienation of property in order to behave as patrons). Moreover, I argue that comprehending the role of the art historical unicum is key to making sense of the visual force of works that were made as risky experiments in both artistic and political rhetoric. The third chapter turns to boundary markers and other inscribed public monuments that aimed to delineate territory in newly and tenuously Christianized spaces east of Saxony. Producing new regimes of measurement, property, and signification, these carved stones transformed the experience of spectatorial orientation into a coercive encounter with political and religious hierarchies. The fourth chapter examines a corpus of fonts carved in southern Scandinavia that responded to local conflicts arising from the introduction of new Christian formas vivendi. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that sculpture played an unusually prominent role in late-twelfth century projects of political subjugation, subject constitution, and aesthetic domination in northern Europe; these ambitions, in turn, dramatically expanded the mandate of sculptural form in the period