The gate of the year

Figure on the left:

Corbel from the Church of Saint Pierre, Champagnolles, Charente, France, built in the XII century.

[Image: http://www.amolenuvolette.it/root/image/abrupt_clio_team.folder/merveilles% 20des%20%C3%A9gllises% 20romanes.folder/]

Figure on the right:

Corbel from the Church of Saint Pierre, Loupiac, Aquitaine, France, built between XI and XII century.

[Image: http://chapiteaux.free.fr/TXT_Champagnolles.html]

According to the Russian historian Michail Bachtin, the “grotesque realism” of medieval art finds its origins in a folk discourse which celebrates the “low” aspects of the body (the belly, the sexual organs), realizing in this way a closer association with earth, viewed at the same time as the grave and as the origin of life. The sexual symbolism referred thus to a rebirth, a regeneration through lowering (Bachtin 1979). The aspects expressing the dimension of sexuality, corporeality, of the ludicrous and carnivalesque, are not only the manifestation of a folk culture opposing itself against the learned, clerical culture, but reveal also a cosmic conception of the human body. Such a conception, in Middle Ages and even in the Renaissance, manifests itself sometimes under the banner of mocking and joking acts: “laughter has a deep meaning of worldview, is one of the most important ways in which the truth about the world in its entirety, about history and man, can express itself” (Bachtin 1979, p. 76).




Male Symbols

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Figure on the left: Corbel from the Church of Saint Pierre, Champagnolles, Charente, France, built in the XII century. [Image: http://www.amolenuvolette.it/root/image/abrupt_clio_team.folder/merveilles% 20des%20%C3%A9gllises% 20romanes.folder/] Figure on the right: Corbel from the Church of Saint Pierre, Loupiac, Aquitaine, France, built between XI and XII century. [Image: http://chapiteaux.free.fr/TXT_Champagnolles.html] According to the Russian historian Michail Bachtin, the “grotesque realism” of medieval art finds its origins in a folk discourse which celebrates the “low” aspects of the body (the belly, the sexual organs), realizing in this way a closer association with earth, viewed at the same time as the grave and as the origin of life. The sexual symbolism referred thus to a rebirth, a regeneration through lowering (Bachtin 1979). The aspects expressing the dimension of sexuality, corporeality, of the ludicrous and carnivalesque, are not only the manifestation of a folk culture opposing itself against the learned, clerical culture, but reveal also a cosmic conception of the human body. Such a conception, in Middle Ages and even in the Renaissance, manifests itself sometimes under the banner of mocking and joking acts: “laughter has a deep meaning of worldview, is one of the most important ways in which the truth about the world in its entirety, about history and man, can express itself” (Bachtin 1979, p. 76).