Online Lecture: ‘Metal and Parchment: Intermedial Entanglements’, part of The Virtual Salon at IMAREAL, Wed 28 October 2026, 5pm (CET)

Joseph Salvatore Ackley (Wesleyan University, Middletown/Connecticut) and Shannon L. Wearing (Meadows Museum, Dallas/Texas) will talk about “Metal and Parchment: Intermedial Entanglements” on Wednesday, 28 October 2026 | 5 p.m. (CET) in the online lecture series “Material Worlds – The Virtual Salon at IMAREAL” .

**Please double-check your local start time, as daylight saving time ends on different dates across countries.**

The use of gold, silver, and other metals is a hallmark of medieval book decoration: indeed, it is the feature that technically makes a manuscript “illuminated.” The adamant materiality of these media, from dazzling golden surfaces to patches of silver blackened by oxidation, generates a fundamental tension between the raw presence of precious metal and its representational capacities. Gold and silver, applied as leaf or pigment, are thus semiotically complex materials, functioning as pictorial media while materially evoking metal things in the real world, from chalices to coins, and embodying wealth itself.

This lecture considers the intermedial entanglements that result from this foundational practice of medieval manuscript decoration. How might metal both disrupt and expand the significance of the manuscript image? How do manuscript depictions of chalices, reliquaries, and other metalworks, especially when rendered with gold and silver, complicate the virtual space of the image? And how might we move toward a fuller, more comprehensive appreciation of the multimedia manuscript image? Case studies will be drawn from deluxe examples of book painting across the Latin West, from the Carolingian period to the thirteenth century.

More information and registration: https://www.imareal.sbg.ac.at/materielle-welten-xxi/

Caption: Colossus and Idol of Nebuchadnezzar from the Munich Golden Psalter, Oxford (?), ca. 1190–1210. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 835, fol. 105v (detail). Lizenz: CC Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universell.