Reframing the margins: marginalised sculpture on Gothic cathedrals

Sammendrag

Architectural sculpture on Gothic cathedrals has been labelled "marginal" by scholarship in the tradition of Michael Camille and Nurith Kenaan-Kedar. A Scandinavian parallel to such sculptures is found in the octagon of Trondheim cathedral. This article offers a critique of the terminology of marginal imagery and its scholarship and examines how the rhetoric of marginality has changed the discourse at the expense of other art historical approaches such as the concept of beauty. Human faces of the Reims masks and sculptures in the Trondheim octagon are examples of how the marginal has overshadowed current scholarship and overloaded its subject with contemporary academic meaning. Michael Camille proposed to bring the margins to the centre. This article aims to reframe the margins and open up to other modes of debate and scholarly interest.