NYTimes.com Article: Michael Camille, Historian of Medieval Art, Dies at 44
Ryan Whyte
has been sent to you by ryan....@utoronto.ca.
Very sad news -- I like Camille's work a lot -- Ryan
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Michael Camille, Historian of Medieval Art, Dies at 44
May 27, 2002
By KEN JOHNSON
Michael Camille, an influential and provocative scholar of
medieval art at the University of Chicago, died on April
29. He was 44.
The cause was a brain tumor, a spokesman for the university
said.
Mr. Camille was noted for bringing contemporary critical
theory and social perspectives to the study of medieval
art. Using anthropological, psychoanalytic, semiotic and
other approaches, as well as traditional art historical
methods, he described the Middle Ages as a time of complex
social and political ferment with similarities to modern
experience, a departure from the more popular conception of
the period as a remote and static "age of faith."
In his first book, "The Gothic Idol: Ideology and
Image-Making in Medieval Art" (1989, Cambridge University
Press), he focused on visual representations of minorities
like pagans, Muslims, Jews and homosexuals.
His most acclaimed book, "Image on the Edge: The Margins of
Medieval Art" (Reaktion Books, 1992), explored how the
higher spiritual ideals of medieval society and earthier
carnal interests were combined in the antic, fantastical
and often profane imagery painted onto the borders of
Gothic manuscript pages. He extended this study to the
sculptures adorning the Cathedral of Notre Dame in his last
book, "Monsters of Modernity: The Gargoyles of Notre Dame,"
which is to be published by the University of Chicago
Press.
Mr. Camille also wrote an introductory survey, "Glorious
Visions: Gothic Art" (Harry N. Abrams, 1996), which became
a widely used textbook.
Mr. Camille was born in 1958 into a working-class family in
Keighley, Yorkshire, England. When he entered Peterhouse
College at Cambridge, he was the first student from his
school to attend that university in 50 years. He graduated
with honors in art history and English and went on to earn
a Ph.D. in art history in 1985, after which he began
teaching at the University of Chicago, where he became the
Mary L. Block professor of art history.
Linda Seidel, the chairwoman of the art history department
at the university, said that Mr. Camille "was really
working on the underside, topics people had ignored before
- the margins of pages, `unimportant' artists who became
mirrors of their time, the edges of buildings,
out-of-the-way carvings."
"There was always this spontaneous emotional connection,"
she said. "He would find something in his subject to
recognize and then make it familiar to everybody else."
Mr. Camille won a 1992-93 National Endowment for the
Humanities fellowship and a 2000-01 Guggenheim fellowship.
His 1996 book "Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre
Remiet, Illuminator" earned him a Governor's Award from
Yale University Press for a distinguished work of
scholarship by an author under 40.
Mr. Camille is survived by his companion, Stuart Michaels;
his parents, Marcel and Mavis Camille; and his sister,
Michelle.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/27/obituaries/27CAMI.html?ex=1023716774&ei=1&en=ead57a537257b220
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