Michael Camille


Michael William Camille was a British art historian and academic, who was an influential, provocative scholar and historian of medieval art and specialist of the European Middle Ages. He was Mary L. Block Professor at the University of Chicago.

Life

Michael Camille was born in Keighley, Yorkshire, on 6 March 1958. He attended Oakbank Grammar School, Keighley, and studied English and Art History at Peterhouse, Cambridge, graduating with a first class honours degree in 1980 and with a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1985. His doctoral thesis was titled "The illustrated manuscripts of Guillaume de Deguileville's 'Pelerinages', 1330-1426".
Immediately after obtaining his doctorate he began work at the University of Chicago, where he remained for the rest of his short career. He was best known for applying post-structuralist ideas to questions of medieval art history. In 1996 he visited Medieval Times with Ira Glass for a segment of This American Life. In 2001 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
He died of a brain tumor on 29 April 2002. The Michael Camille Essay Prize was established in his honor, for his brilliance in art history.

Legacy

The New York Times obituary of Michael Camille stated that "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." Camille's new approach marked "a departure from the more popular conception of the period as a remote and static 'age of faith.'
The journal Gesta noted that "Camille's first article in the English journal Art History brought him immediate attention." Camille applied himself to "the traditional field of medieval manuscript illumination," but with new perspectives.
His work, observed The Guardian, has been translated into "Spanish, French, Japanese, and Korean," and his book Image on the Edge "was reviewed by publications ranging from the Burlington Magazine to the Wall Street Journal.''"

Works

  • The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art .
  • Image on the Edge.
  • Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator.
  • Gothic Art: Glorious Visions.
  • Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England.
  • The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire.
  • "Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing." In Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw : 197–223.
  • The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity.