The Camel’s Compromised Form

This article draws on recent trends in Marxist critique in order to analyze instances of compromised, misshapen, and deformed form in late medieval art. Produced in a range of media, these episodes exposed the contingent features of two formal enterprises crucial to the structure of the representational order: the moral exemplar and the nascent commodity. A reinvigorated mode of political formalism reveals the stakes of parsing an art of deflation that responded to a period crisis in the representational order.