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| Primavera, Sandro Botticelli (1470s/80s) |
As Trinity term starts in Oxford, it is not only teaching
which has moved online, but also the regular College and Faculty committee
meetings which pepper the diaries of academics in this self-governing republic
of scholars. Normally, we meet in groups of 20 in the high-ceilinged rooms of
the History Faculty, in groups of 10 in Somerville’s SCR Dining Room,
or in the full 40+ Governing Body assembly of college Fellows, in the basement
hall of our 1970s’ Wolfson building. Instead, we now meet exclusively on
screens. Microsoft Teams, the video-conferencing tool used by the University
(and the UK House of Lords), currently shows only the faces of the four most recent
speakers. The other digitally-present committee members are visible purely as
tiny initials at the bottom of the screen. While online committee meetings work
surprisingly well in many respects, the move from physical Oxford rooms to
screens has revealed how much of a traditional meeting is conducted silently,
via body language. Not all 40, 20 or 10 members of a committee will speak on
every topic on the agenda, of course, but vigorous nods, discreet frowns,
smiles, agitated shuffling of papers – even when only half-registered by others
– together create a mood, a collective sense of a group reaction, over and
above what is actually said (and minuted). At present, we cannot see our
non-speaking colleagues’ mini-gestures, just rows of silent initials in coloured
circles – even as we grapple with critical issues, such as the financial
challenge which the pandemic urgently poses for Oxford colleges, or the
implications of social distancing for teaching now and in the months to come.
The ‘chat’ function, where committee members can post brief comments on the
discussion in a side bar for all to see, is helpful, but it is still verbal
communication; with emojis, but without gesture or human facial expressions.
Historians
have for decades studied the role and importance of gesture,
particularly in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The theme of the International
Medieval Congress in Leeds (IMC) back in 2006, for example, was ‘Emotion and
Gesture’; in 2016, Piotr Węcowski of Warsaw University published on the gestures of
the Jagiellonian kings of Poland in the 15C and 16C, and their grave political
meaning to contemporaries. Michael Baxandall’s celebrated book, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972), argued that decoding body language in Renaissance paintings is
key to understanding their meanings and composition. He pointed out, for
example, that in Botticelli’s famously enigmatic Primavera,
Venus’ raised hand would have been understood by (educated) contemporaries as a
gesture of welcome to her spring bower. Or that the manically grinning,
pointing angel seen at the foot of many Renaissance paintings is a reference to
a character familiar from 15C street theatre – the festaiulo who literally pointed out which actor the viewer should be
paying attention to. Late medieval preachers, meanwhile, had a
repertoire of gestures, or sign language, so extensive that (some argue) a wandering Italian
friar could preach through body language alone in, say, Brittany. By contrast, on Teams we communicate oblivious to most of the pointing, sighing and waving of colleagues.
