Imagining the Magdeburg Rider

Abstract

Imagining the Magdeburg RiderStanding in the middle of the Old Market square, the Magdeburger Reiter constitutes one of the earliest free-standing public monuments in medieval times. In spite of its unique and singular constellation, the sculpture lacks any religious meaning, and its political context and specific identity also remain vague. This article sets out to demonstrate that the enigmatic nature of the sculpture was intentionally designed in order to evoke the imaginative responses of the medieval viewers. Tracing the later medieval discourse on the living statue in the courtly literature on the one hand, and the simulacrum, in religious and travel literature, on the other hand, reveals how life-size sculptures in a non-exclusively-religious context functioned as a full substitution for the Real in an interactive environment. I offer here an alternative model of medieval spectatorship and show how the Magdeburg Rider was devised to encourage the speculations of its viewers, blurring the boundaries between the representation and the viewers, the imaginative and the Real.The Magdeburg Rider is among the enigmatic works of medieval sculpture (Fig. 1). Being the earliest known free-standing equestrian monument in medieval times, and standing in the Old Market Square of Magdeburg accompanied by two female figures, it has neither a direct precedent nor direct sequel in terms of composition, iconography, installation, and performance. 1 Moreover, in spite of its particularity, verisimilitude quality, and psychological presence, the Rider has no specific identity that can be confirmed either by textual or visual evidence, or by iconological concatenation. Blurring the historical distance between the monument and its modern viewers, Hans Fiedler perceived the Magdeburg Rider simply as a "Nationaldenkmal des deutschen Mittelalters," pronouncing the power of the German [Third] Reich, of which medieval Saxony had laid the foundations (Fiedler 1937, 240), a stone testimony to the ideal medieval as well as modern German. 2 This article seeks to re-examine the (fictive) identifications evoked by the Magdeburg Rider and to show how abolishing the distance, both temporal and emotional, between the Rider and its viewers constitutes an interpretive strategy offered by the sculpture itself, as a consequence of the incomplete semiotic fields of appearance and at-1 The relation to the Bamberg Rider is discussed below. The only possible sequel of the sculpture is the fourteenth-century equestrian monument of Bernabò Viconti, 1363; this is, however, not a public free-standing sculpture but a tomb monument honoring a specific person, originally installed in the Church of S. Giovanni in Conca. Moreover, the two female figures accompanying Bernabò are conventional personifications of justice and courage, unlike the unidentified female figures in the Magdeburg ensemble (see Palmer 1997). 2 On this unrestrained Pygmalionism, in which the sculptures were understood as living contemporaries in the German nationalistic discourse, see S...