The Chartreuse de Champmol is known to students of the fifteenth century as the burial mausoleum of the Valois Burgundian dukes and the location of such famous works as Claus Sluter’s Well of Moses, naturalistic portal sculptures of Margaret of Flanders and Philip the Bold, and Philip the Bold’s tomb with its pleurants. There has been renewed interest in both these individual works and the monument as a whole in the past decade, spurred by the recent Paris-Cleveland show Art from the Court of Burgundy (2004–5) and publications by Renate Prochno, Susie Nash, and Sherry Lindquist among others. Lindquist’s Agency, Visuality and Society at the Chartreuse de Champmol builds on this research to not only reconstruct the long-dismantled monument as a whole, but also to explicate its complicated structure in relation to an equally complicated and conflicted set of interests involved in its creation. Contrary to its modern reputation as a site of innovation, Lindquist argues that the monument was fundamentally conservative, its novelties marshaled in support of traditional social structures. While I might have liked to see certain points expanded further, and greater attention given to issues other than the articulation of political power, the final text is densely packed with intriguing insights into both individual works and the collaborative creative process.

For Lindquist, the Chartreuse de Champmol should be read in “social” terms, by which she explicitly intends political and gender concerns rather than devotional ones. The introductory chapter begins not with the Chartreuse de Champmol but rather with the Cartuja of Aula Dei and the 1996 controversy surrounding female access to the Goya murals in it. Lindquist uses this incident to introduce her key themes: charterhouses and monuments more generally as makers of social distinction, the disjunctions created by the intervention of modern states as they dismantle and recontextualize monuments, and the importance of studying these monuments in terms of their original physically immediate relationships and social context.

Lindquist makes a strong argument for considering the Chartreuse as, at least in part, an attempt to secure favor for the union of French and Flemish power in the ducal couple, and for the importance of Margaret of Flanders as a partner rather than tool in this endeavor. Chapter 2, “The Monument,” bears out earlier claims to a political analysis by triangulating three objects of study: the dynastic concerns of Philip the Bold and Margaret of Flanders, the troubled relationship between ideology and actuality in the Carthusian Order, and the physical arrangement of the Chartreuse at Champmol. The section on the Carthusians seems simply devoted to proving that their longstanding reputation for strict observance is more myth than reality, and highlights the contradictory needs for isolation and poverty and interaction with the laity, particularly women. The third and most extensive section provides a tour of a reconstructed Champmol. Lindquist’s version is in basic agreement with Prochno’s recent Die Kartause von Champmol. Grablege der burgundischen Herzöge (1364–1477) (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002). While noting points on which she differs from previous reconstructions, Lindquist often abbreviates and removes her supporting arguments to the footnotes, or omits them altogether. This is likely the result of pressures to make the text more accessible, but sometimes leaves the reader unsure as to the reasoning behind various assertions.

In chapter 3, “Agency,” Lindquist draws a compelling portrait of the interplay between collaborating artists, bureaucrats, and multiple patrons’ desires that resulted in the Chartreuse de Champmol, challenging both the concept of autonomous genius and the simple model of patron-artist interaction. This new picture of artistic practice calls into question Martin Warnke’s argument that personal relationships between rulers and artists led to the rise of modern notions of the artist (Martin Warnke, The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist, trans. David McLintock. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Lindquist instead draws attention to the assimilation of artists into the upper court bureaucracy with whom they interacted closely and even began to intermarry. This careful and nuanced use of archival sources offers a useful model for discussions of patronage in general, and requires a rethinking of many assumptions in current literature on the Burgundian court in particular.

Chapter 4, “Visuality,” argues that stylistic and iconographic innovation at Champmol was not an end in itself but rather a widely recognized method for asserting the desires of patrons. These desires are read almost exclusively in terms of political power: the naturalistic style and odd proportions of Sluter’s portal group, for example, are interpreted as means to make the image memorable and connect the ducal couple with the naturalistic portrait images of Charles V. Similarly, the use of novel iconographies related to suffering such as the Pietà and violent Martyrdom of St. Denis are equated with the assertion of aristocratic power. Lindquist stresses the importance of two terms for interpreting this aesthetics of authority: strangeness and intervisuality. Strangeness is used to denote something that is new enough to evoke surprise but familiar enough to be understood, an effect Lindquist links to making an image memorable. Intervisuality is a visual equivalent of intertextuality; as a methodology it requires individual works such as the tomb of Philip the Bold to be read in relation to the charterhouse complex as a whole as well as some images outside the site. She notes, for example, the special status granted to Philip the Bold’s tomb effigy through its polychromy, a feature it shares with statues of holy figures but not Philip’s contemporaries or even his and his wife’s portal images, all of which were unpainted. The final section considers the Carthusian assertion of status through an emphasis on bodily control and reading and writing in the iconographic program: this maneuvering is expressly presented as a parallel to the techniques used to promote ducal ideology.

Moving from the creation to the reception of Champmol, in chapter 5, entitled “Society,” Lindquist argues that the site helped negotiate interactions between the monks and a relatively diverse lay audience by at once establishing and limiting contact. She argues that despite their claims to isolation the monks were actively engaged in the community both economically and as spiritual guides. The contradictory needs to maintain outside contacts and adhere to a hermetic ideal were negotiated through the regulation of space within the charterhouse: special liminal zones were created for contact with the laity, particularly lay women, and shared lay-monastic spaces were divided by screens, walls, and covered walkways. The monks’ purity and exclusivity, manifested through separation, was thus made highly visible: degrees of access were graded by rank and gender, maintaining conservative societal norms.

Lindquist’s densely packed treatment raises interesting questions concerning the processes underlying the monument as a whole and the analysis of particular sculptures. Perhaps inevitably, she does not always fully answer them, at times preferring to leave to the reader’s discretion the decision between multiple and contradictory possibilities. It is particularly at these points that fuller elaboration of the rationale for each view would be helpful. Some subsidiary arguments—such as the claim that Jean Marville’s commission to create Philip the Bold’s tomb image was dependent upon his previous work on the decorative elements of Charles V’s tomb, giving him familiarity with naturalistic rendering—are not entirely convincing as currently presented. While the book repeatedly draws attention to the differences between the present and past, it has a somewhat complicated relationship to theory: although older methodologies are usefully questioned, more recent theorists are not subjected to the same degree of scrutiny. Though Lindquist is far from alone in reading Burgundian ducal patronage as a reification of social power and subordinating potential spiritual meaning to politics, I would have liked to see greater serious attention given to the religious aspect of Champmol and the potential interplay between such concerns and those addressed in the text.

Lindquist has created a thought-provoking, if not entirely tidy, account. She makes valuable moves toward seeing Champmol as a complex, both in terms of how its physical elements related to each other and the social forces at work in its construction and reception. Her rethinking of the interaction between patrons and artists is particularly compelling, and has implications not only for Burgundian studies but patronage studies as a whole. She also brings welcome attention to the roles of Margaret of Flanders and the Carthusians, which are revealed to be both integral to the creation of Champmol and highly ambiguous. In all, Lindquist provides a stimulating portrait of the creation and reception of art as the constant construction of social identities at the turn of the fifteenth century.