Medieval Art Research

CfP: Workshop on Medieval Germany, German Historical Institute, Friday 5 May 2017

Workshop on Medieval Germany, German Historical Institute, 17 Bloomsbury Square, London, WC1A 2NJ, Friday 5 May 2017

Organised by the German Historical Institute London in co-operation with the German Historical Institute Washington and the German History Society, to be held at the GHIL

Deadline: Monday 9 January 2017

A one-day workshop on Medieval Germany will be held at the German Historical Institute, Bloomsbury Square, London, on Friday 5 May 2017. It will provide an opportunity for researchers in the field from the UK, continental Europe, and the USA to meet in a relaxed and friendly setting and to learn more about each other’s work. Proposals for short papers are invited from researchers at all career stages with an interest in any aspect of the history of medieval Germany (generously defined). Papers should be 10-15 minutes in length, and will be followed by discussion. Contributors are encouraged to concentrate upon introducing current work in progress, focusing on research questions, approaches, and still-unresolved problems.

Attendance is also warmly invited from anyone with an interest in medieval German history wishing to hear the papers and participate in the discussion. Further details of times and programme will be posted in due course.

The workshop is sponsored by the German History Society and the German Historical Institute London in cooperation with the GHI Washington. Participation is free, including lunch. However, participants will have to bear costs for travel and accommodation themselves.

Doctoral students from North America (USA and Canada) who wish to present at the workshop can apply for two travel funding grants provided by the GHI Washington. Please indicate your interest in this grant in your application.

Support for postgraduate and early career researchers from the United Kingdom and The Republic of Ireland is available on a competitive basis, subject to eligibility requirements. Postgraduate members of the German History Society currently registered for a higher degree at a university in the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland, and those who have completed a PhD within two years of the deadline for application but who have no other institutional sources of funding may apply for up to £150 for travel and accommodation expenses. Please see the GHS website (http://www.germanhistorysociety.org/postgraduates/) for further information and application deadlines.

Please send proposals (title and ca. 200-word abstract), by Monday 9 January 2017, to Dr Cornelia Linde at the German Historical Institute: (linde@ghil.ac.uk)

Informal inquiries regarding all aspects of the workshop should be sent to Len Scales (l.e.scales@durham.ac.uk)

All students and academic researchers interested in medieval German history are very welcome to attend. There is no charge for attendance but due to limited space booking is essential. Please RSVP to Carole Sterckx: sterckx@ghil.ac.uk

Seminar: Medieval Textiles: Meaning and Materiality, 25th November 2016

Birkbeck Medieval Seminar: Medieval Textiles: Meaning and Materiality

On the occasion of the V&A Museum’s unprecedented exhibition of opus anglicanum, this one-day interdisciplinary conference brings together leading and emerging scholars working on questions of meaning and materiality in medieval textiles, both real and imaginary.

The conference is organised by Birkbeck Medieval Seminar and the History of Art Department with support of the Murray Bequest. The programme, and details of how to book can be found at: https://medtex.eventbrite.co.uk

Friday 25^th November, 2016, 10.00am -5.00pm.

Birkbeck, University of London, Room 101, 30 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DT

Seminar: Flemish Manuscript Illumination and Antwerp Mannerism, 12 October 2016

Joint Renaissance Medieval Work in Progress Seminar: Flemish Manuscript Illumination and Antwerp Mannerism

The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London

Wednesday 12 October 2016  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm

Research Forum seminar room, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 0RN

Speaker Dr Elizabeth Morrison: Senior Curator of Manuscripts J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Although it has been well established that Flemish manuscript illumination of the sixteenth century was deeply entwined with the art of panel painting, most studies have heretofore largely considered individual artists or looked at the cross-over of particular instances of iconography. The recent acquisition by the J. Paul Getty Museum of a magnificent manuscript of the Livre des fais de Jacques de Lalaing opens new avenues of research into the concept of overall stylistic borrowings between the two media. The manuscript’s miniatures are the work of an unknown artist who was deeply influenced by the work of the so-called “Antwerp Mannerists” in terms of style and the integration of well-known tropes, but also artfully combined with established elements associated with vernacular manuscript painting of the period. This paper will consider how this artist, whose work has been identified in a handful of manuscripts, creates an innovative fusion between the arts of manuscript and panel painting, taking astute advantage of the possibilities offered by both.

New Publications: The Epiphany of Hieronymus Bosch, by D.H. Strickland

The Epiphany of Hieronymus Bosch: Imagining Antichrist and Others from the Middle Ages to the Reformation, by D.H. Strickland

This study examines medieval Christian views of non-Christians and their changing political and theological significance as revealed in late-medieval and early-modern visual culture. Taking as her point of departure Hieronymus Bosch’s famous Epiphany triptych housed in the Prado Museum in Madrid, the author analyzes how representations of Jews, Saracens (later Turks), ‘Ethiopians’, and Mongols for centuries shaped western Christian attitudes towards salvation history, contemporary political conflicts, and the declining status of the Roman Church. She argues that Bosch’s innovative pictorial warning of the coming of Antichrist and the threat posed by non-Christians gained its power and authority through inter-visual references to the medieval past. Before and after Bosch, imaginative constructions that identified Jews and Turks with Gog and Magog, or the Pope with Antichrist, drew upon a long-established range of artistic and rhetorical strategies that artists and authors reconfigured as changing political circumstances demanded. Painted at a pivotal moment on the eve of the Reformation, the Prado Epiphany is a compelling lens through which to look backwards to the Middle Ages, and forwards to Martin Luther and the ideological significance of escalating Christian/non-Christian conflicts in the formation of the new Protestant church.

New Publications: Jan de Beer, Gothic Renewal in Renaissance Antwerp

Jan de Beer, Gothic Renewal in Renaissance Antwerp

Author: D. Ewing

Brepols Publishers

The first published monograph on the Antwerp painter Jan de Beer (c.1475-1527 /28), with an oeuvre catalogue.

The Antwerp painter Jan de Beer (c.1475-1527/28) was highly esteemed in his lifetime and still famous forty years after his death, but then fell into oblivion until the early twentieth century. This monograph is the first published, comprehensive study of his art and career. Its biography is the result of a thorough search of the archives and includes a recently discovered teaching contract with Lieven van Male of Ghent. All documents are fully transcribed, including documents for the artist’s painter-son, Aert de Beer (c.1508-1538/40). Results from technical studies of the artist’s work, including underdrawings and dendrochronological dating, are incorporated throughout the book.

The artist’s surviving oeuvre consists of forty works, mainly devotional paintings and triptychs but also a dozen drawings and a stained glass window in Antwerp Cathedral after a lost design. De Beer’s stylish, elegant art exerted a powerful appeal upon the buying public, churches abroad, and copyists. His lost Adoration of the Magi was the best-selling painting design in Antwerp at the time. De Beer is further important as one of only two Antwerp artists of his generation for whom a significant body of drawings exists. The catalogue of paintings and drawings by the artist and his workshop, including the numerous copies and variants, comes to over 170 works.

De Beer’s art is typically associated with the work of the Antwerp Mannerists, a prominent group of painters active in the city during his lifetime. This study argues that De Beer’s work, plus that of the Mannerists and the city’s retable carvers, should be understood as a novel, modern expression of late Gothic art, a sixteenth-century renewal of the Gothic mode that was also manifested in contemporary architecture, calligraphy, music and poetry.

New Publications: Body-Worlds: Opicinus de Canistris and the Medieval Cartographic Imagination

Body-Worlds: Opicinus de Canistris and the Medieval Cartographic Imagination

Author: K. Whittington

Brepols Publishers

In 1334, an Italian priest named Opicinus de Canistris fell ill and experienced a divine vision of continents and oceans transformed into human figures, a vision which inspired numerous drawings. While they relate closely to contemporary maps and seacharts, religious iconography, medical illustration, and cosmological diagrams, Opicinus’s drawings cannot be assimilated to any of these categories. In their beautiful strangeness they complicate many of our assumptions about medieval visual culture, and spark lines of inquiry into the interplay of religion and science, the practice of experimentation, the operations of allegory in the fourteenth century, and ultimately into the status of representation itself.

Reviews

“Karl Whittington’s Body-Worlds brings Opicinus de Canistris’ idiosyncratic drawings out of the purely personal, mentally disturbed world to which they have generally been consigned into a more normative and accessible realm. To unlock their forms and meanings, Whittington persuasively compares the odd renderings to portolan charts used in marine navigation, which he sees as foundational to Opicinus’s project. And, building on the work of Michael Camille and Victoria Morse, he subjects the drawings to a sensitive analysis that never flattens these indisputably eccentric works but, in the end, enhances their innovative nature even while rendering it understandable.”

– Herbert L. Kessler, Johns Hopkins University

“Opicinus’s drawings contribute in new and unexpected ways to our understanding of the late medieval church, the history of vision and sensibilities, the body, the history of cartography, and Mediterranean studies. Karl Whittington is an intelligent reader of these very difficult works and a wonderful guide for readers encountering this material for the first time. His book will open up an important and under-utilized corpus for further study and should spark an on-going conversation about these intriguing manuscripts.”

– Victoria Morse, Carleton College

“In Body-Worlds, Karl Whittington has produced a magisterial study of the enigmatic drawings of Opicinus de Canistris. Focusing on a key grouping within the larger corpus of images, he examines some two dozen illustrations that superimpose human bodies on the form of the earth, its seas, and its continents. Two questions guide his task: why would this late medieval thinker adapt a diagrammatic form based on current understanding of cartography; and why turn this image into a system for analyzing broad theological and philosophical questions of the day? Although some scholars believe that Opicinus suffered from a form of physical and mental disorder, and that the drawings reflect a disturbed state of mind, Whittington’s complex study indicates otherwise. Whittington does justice to the rich multivalent nature of these drawings, showing us how Opicinus understood the relationship between the body and cosmos, as well as how sexuality and gender worked as important conceptual tools in his visionary system.”

– Catherine Harding, University of Victoria

ANN: Summer Course: Study of the Arts in Flanders (Leuven, 18-29 June 2017)

Leuven, Belgium, June 18 – 28, 2017

Deadline: Nov 30, 2016

Several Flemish research centres, universities and art museums
collaboratively organise the third edition of the Summer Course for the
Study of the Arts in Flanders in the summer of 2017. After the success
of the two previous editions with a focus on Jan van Eyck and Peter
Paul Rubens, this edition zooms in on Late Medieval and Early
Renaissance Sculpture. The target group for the course are master and
PhD-students in (art) history and junior curators from all over the
world.

The aim of the Summer Course is to bring to Flanders, annually, a group
of 18 select national and international, highly qualified young
researchers and to present them with an intensive 11-day program of
lectures, discussions, and on-site visits. The theme varies annually
and focuses each year on a different art-historical period. The aim is
to provide the participants with a clear insight into the Flemish art
collections from the period at hand, as well as into the available and
most suited research methods, the state of the research and the
research needs. After the course the students will be ambassadors for
the Flemish arts abroad.

The third edition of the summer course is titled Medieval and
Renaissance Sculpture in the Low Countries and will take place from
June 18 through June 28, 2017. It is coordinated by Museum M – Leuven
and the Flemish Art Collection. Excursions will be made to Leuven,
Mechelen, Bruges, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Utrecht, Maastricht, Aachen,
Liège, Zoutleeuw and Brussels. The language of the Summer Course will
be English.

Candidates have earned an MA or are enrolled in a PhD programme, with a
focus on Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Sculpture. Candidates are
at the start of their professional career.
Thanks to the generous support of the Flemish Government the
participation fee of the Summer Course is now set at €900 per person.
The fee includes the full 11-day programme, 10 overnight hotel stays in
a single-occupancy room, all transportation within the programme, all
entry tickets, 2 receptions, 5 lunches and 5 dinners. Not included in
the participation fee is the transportation to and from Belgium.

Four grants in total will be awarded. Thanks to the generous support of
the Samuel H. Kress Foundation’s History of Art Grants Program 2 US
students and citizens are offered a grant that will fully cover the
programme fee and round trip flights between Belgium and the US.

The organisers of the Summer Course together with the Flemish
Government have made available 2 grants of €450 each. The recipients of
the grant will pay a reduced participation fee of €450 instead of the
regular fee.

Apply now through November 30, 2016. Mail to
Matthias.Depoorter@vlaamsekunstcollectie.be.

The Summer Course is a joint initiative of Museum M – Leuven, the Royal
Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, the Groeninge Museum Bruges, the Museum of
Fine Arts Ghent, the University of Ghent, the Catholic University of
Leuven, the Flemish Research Centre for the Arts in the Burgundian
Netherlands, the Rubenianum and the Flemish Art Collection. The
structural content partner for this edition is the Royal Institute for
Cultural Heritage.

Contact: Matthias.Depoorter@vlaamsekunstcollectie.be
Website: http://summercourse.eu
Facebook: http://on.fb.me/1VSivk4
Youtube: https://youtu.be/p95n769iVI0

Cambridge Medieval Art Seminar Series: ‘Craft, Process, Techne’, 2016-2017

The University of Cambridge Senior Seminar in Medieval Art meets every other week during full term, attracting an impressive range of speakers from home and abroad.

The Department of the History of Art is pleased to announce the programme for the annual Medieval Art Seminar Series 2016-17. The seminars will explore ideas of craft and process in medieval art at practical and theoretical levels.

Papers (and in one case, a trip to the V&A) will be held on alternating Mondays during Michaelmas and Lent terms and the final two papers of our series will be held in Easter term. The venue for the seminars is Lecture Room 2 of the History of Art Department (1-5 Scroope Terrace, Cambridge CB2 1PX), beginning promptly at 5.30pm. Following questions, attendees are invited to stay and speak more informally with speakers over wine and light nibbles. Lectures are free and open to the public.

Organisers: Robert Hawkins, Amy Jeffs

Please email Robert Hawkins at rh540@cam.ac.uk with any queries.

Programme:

Monday 10th October

Zoe Boden (Victoria and Albert Museum & University of Glasgow)

Opus Anglicanum and the Steeple Aston Cope

Monday 24th October

Group visit to the Opus Anglicanum Exhibition, meet 1.45pm at the V&A

Monday 7th November

Dr George Younge (University of York)

Anglo-Saxon sources of the Theological Windows at Canterbury Cathedral

Monday 21st November

Prof Richard Sennett (LSE and NYU)

The Craftsman: a Discussion

Monday 23rd January

Dr Lucy Wrapson (University of Cambridge, HKI)

Thomas Gooch and Thomas Loveday, two Suffolk Carpenters and their Rood Screens

Monday 6th February

Anya Burgon (University of Cambridge)

The Mechanical Arts in Twelfth-Century School Poetry

Monday 20th February

Dr Peter Dent (University of Bristol)

‘Domine dio fece scolpire questa croce’: Carving the Crucifix in Late Medieval Italy

Monday 27th February

Prof Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen)

The Craft of Spinning

Monday 6th March

Dr Tom Nickson (Courtauld Institute of Art)

Gothic Encounters? Architectural History, Phenomenology and the Gothic Church

Monday 1st May

Prof Susan Rankin (University of Cambridge)

Writing sound : Designing Notation : Carolingian Musical Techne

Monday 15th May

Agata Gomolka (University of East Anglia)

Carving Romanesque Chiaroscuro

Exhibition: A Feast for the Senses: Art and Experience in Medieval Europe, Walters Art Museum, 16 October 2016 – 8 January 2017

Walters Presents A Feast for the Senses: Art and Experience in Medieval Europe Features more than 100 objects from world-renowned collections

Baltimore, MD – The Walters Art Museum presents A Feast for the Senses: Art and Experience in Medieval Europe, a major international loan exhibition that brings together more than 100 works including stained glass, precious metals, ivories, tapestries, paintings, prints, and illuminated manuscripts from 25 public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad, including the Walters’ extraordinary medieval collection. On view from October 16, 2016 through January 8, 2017, A Feast for the Senses explores how medieval works of art spoke to all the senses. Luminous stained glass windows, tapestries depicting fragrant gardens, chalices used in the Eucharist—these objects were not only seen, but were also, and at the same time, touched, smelled, tasted, and heard. The Walters is first of only two venues to host this extraordinary exhibition. Admission is free.

During the late medieval period—roughly the 12th to 15th centuries—religious and secular life mingled to the point that the boundaries between them become hard to distinguish: the delights of life and anticipation of heavenly reward were closely intertwined. The arts of the time reflect a new interest in human experience, the enjoyment of nature, and the pursuit of pleasure by evoking and celebrating beauty through all of the senses. While such pleasures were not directed exclusively toward spiritual enlightenment, religious practices were also defined by rich sensory experiences.

The exhibition evokes these not only through the works of art on view but also through specially designed sensory experiences, ranging from smells of roses and incense to the sounds of church bells and gardens, and the tactility of rosary beads.

“In many museums today, visitors experience the artworks by viewing them from afar in silent galleries. A Feast for the Senses will push the boundaries of the art museum by inviting visitors to encounter art with more than just their eyes,” says exhibition curator Martina Bagnoli (former Walters’ curator of medieval art, who is now executive director of the Gallerie Estensi in Modena, Italy).

Loans and Support

More than 25 museums and collections in the United States and abroad are lending works to the exhibition, including the British Museum, London; the Musée du Louvre, Paris; the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. The exhibition also includes masterpieces from the Walters’ renowned collection of medieval art, one of the most important in the United States

A Feast for the Senses has been organized by the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, in partnership with the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, and will be on view at the Ringling February 4 through April 20, 2017.

The exhibition received major funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor; the Institute of Museum and Library Services; the National Endowment for the Arts; and anonymous donors, with additional support from the Gary Vikan Exhibition Fund, Nanci and Ned Feltham, and the Helen Hughes Trust. The accompanying catalogue was made possible by an anonymous donor. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, or the National Endowment for the Arts.

This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Accompanying Publication

A generously illustrated catalogue presents new research in the developing field of sensory perception within art history. It includes essays by leading scholars exploring the themes of the exhibition through representations of religious practices, royal rituals, feasts and celebrations, and music and literature. Edited by exhibition curator Martina Bagnoli, the catalogue is published by the Walters Art Museum and distributed by Yale University Press. It is available for sale in the Walters Art Museum Store and online ($65, hardcover) beginning in mid-October.

Opening Day Event

A public opening day talk Symposium on the Senses in Medieval Culture will be held Sunday, October 16 at 1:30 p.m. Exhibition curator Martina Bagnoli, Walters’ in-house curator Joaneath Spicer, and other scholars will explore aspects of the role played by sensory perception in medieval culture that are both surprising and completely familiar to us today. A reception and book signing follow.

Tickets are $10, and free for Walters members.

Lecture: ‘Light and colour; dark and shadow’, with Professor Liz James, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 11 October 2016, 17:30 pm

Prof Liz James (University of Sussex): ‘Light and colour; dark and shadow’

Light and colour, darkness and shadow, are all fundamental aspects of works of art in a practical way (can we see the work?), a formal fashion (what colours are used?) and conceptually (why these colours? Why this light or this lighting?). But they are also elements of the work of art that have tended to have a secondary place within the history of art. Through a discussion of Byzantine monumental mosaics, this lecture will consider some of the ways in which light, dark, colour and shade are fundamental elements in the appearance, effectiveness and function of images.

Liz James is Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex and a Byzantinist. She has been interested in light and colour for a long time, writing her doctoral thesis on colour in Byzantium. She has just finished writing a book about medieval mosaics (provisionally entitled ‘A short history of medieval mosaics’).

Ticket / entry details:

Tuesday 11 October 2016
5:30 pm – 6:30 pm

Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 0RN

This lecture launches the Frank Davis Memorial Series on Light/Darkness

Open to all, free admission