Italian Renaissance churches and the museums connected to them house impressive but often overlooked treasures in a variety of media: paint, stone, textile, glass, parchment, and precious metals and gems. Within the walls of the Museum, Archive, and Church of Santa Croce in Florence is a group of artworks created by Pacino di Bonaguida (about 1303-about 1347) and his workshop. Once one looks past the impressive fresco cycles by Giotto, Taddeo Gaddi, Bernardo Daddi and others, and after using a bit of imagination to envision what the church looked like before Giorgio Vasari’s renovations in the 16th century and the Neoclassical revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, one finally encounters sets of stained glass windows and a pair of choir books that have survived the Black Death, floods, and a world war. In the…
This Symposium is to be held jointly by the Church Monuments Society and the Centre for Medieval and Modern Studies, University of Kent. The Symposium will focus on the monuments in the cathedral together with related high status tombs. We will begin on Friday afternoon with an optional visit to the cathedral’s mason’s yard and with an evening reception and dinner, followed by the keynote lecture. Lectures will begin on Saturday morning, and after lunch we will take the coach to the cathedral when delegates will have their own free time to look around or visit the cathedral library. After evensong we will have sole access to the cathedral together with talks on the monuments. On Saturday evening there is a drinks reception and dinner, followed by members’ contributions. On Sunday a varied lecture programme will be delivered, and the Symposium will close with afternoon tea at 4.00. The event is also open to those who wish to attend on a daily basis.
List of speakers
Kent Rowland Henry VIII’s influence at Canterbury Cathedral
Tim Tatton Brown The late Medieval monuments and shrines in the eastern arm of Canterbury Cathedral
David Green The Black Prince
Kenneth Fincham & David Shaw The Boys monument
Jessica Barker Margaret Holland and her two husbands
Kim Woods Effigies in alabaster in Canterbury Cathedral
Sophie Oosterwijk Copper-alloy tombs in Medieval Europe
Melanie Caiazza Expeditions and effigies: (re)locating death, burial and family narratives – a closer look at the case of Sir James Hales
Barbara Tomlinson Commemorating Admiral Sir George Rooke (1650-1708) and his naval contemporaries
Jean Wilson Lies, damned lies and monuments: two military memorials in Canterbury Cathedral
Anyone wishing to give a short paper under members’ contributions should contact the organiser, Mark Downing.
The Symposium is to be held at the University of Kent, Canterbury, which is about 20 minutes walk from the city centre. Accommodation is in single en-suite bedrooms. The cost for the full Symposium is £250 (£270 for non-members), full board. Alternatively, delegates may choose to attend on a non-residential basis: Saturday – morning lectures, lunch, coach travel to the cathedral and entry (fee: £60, non-members £70), and/or Sunday – lectures including lunch (fee: £45 non-members £55).
For further information on how to book, visit the Church Monuments Society’s website.
Call for ICMA Sponsored Session Proposals College Art Association, Washington DC, 3-6 February 2016
Deadline: 15 August 2014
The International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA) seeks proposals for sessions to be held under the organization’s sponsorship in 2016 at the annual College Art Association. Session organizers and speakers must be ICMA members. Proposals for ICMA sponsorship should consist of a title, an abstract, and a CV. Thanks to a generous grant from the Kress Foundation, funds may be available to defray travel costs of sponsored session speakers. Please direct all session proposals and inquiries by Aug. 15, 2014 to the Chair of the Programs Committee: Elina Gertsman, Department of Art History and Art, Case Western Reserve University, email: elina.gertsman@case.edu.
Call for Papers: The Cross in Medieval Art International Center of Medieval Art Sponsored Session (Kalamazoo 2015) Deadline: 15 September 2014
Recent art-historical research has brought us new understandings of the central symbol of Christianity, the Cross, in different places, at different times, in different media, and with different theoretical and conceptual foci. The Cross, its representations and significations, and the appearance and materiality of those representations, features in many areas of current research, but not often as a central subject to be dealt with thematically and comparatively. This session invites considerations of images depicting, representing or referring to the Cross in any media, and across the middle ages, from early to late. The aim of the session is to consider what can be gained at this particular moment in scholarship from a common concentration on the theme of the Cross. Therefore, proposers are invited especially to consider their subject matter in light of theoretical perspectives that have been prominent in recent art-historical scholarship, such as (but not limited to) affect, emotion, movement, medium and materiality.
Conference: Invention and Imagination in British Art and Architecture, 600-1500 London, The British Museum, 30 October – 1 November 2014 A collaborative event organised by the Paul Mellon Centre and The British Museum
This conference will explore the ways in which artists and patrons in Britain devised and introduced new or distinctive imagery, styles and techniques, as well as novel approaches to bringing different media together. It is concerned with the mechanisms of innovation, with inventive and imaginative processes, and with the relations between conventions and individual expression. The conversation will therefore also address the very notions of sameness and difference in medieval art and architecture, and how these may be evaluated and explained historically.
Topics for discussion can include authorship, creativity, experimentation, envisaging, representation, and regulation by guilds or patrons, as well as casestudies of particular objects, buildings, commissions or practices.
The conference will take place on 30th October – 1st November at The British Museum; it will include collaborations with the museum’s Department of Prehistory & Europe and opportunities to see works from the collection.
List of participants and speakers’ titles & abstracts (A-Z)
Jessica Barker (PhD Candidate : Courtauld Institute of Art) Effigies of Husband and Wife at Bredon and Lowthorpe: Investigating Unique Iconography on Fourteenth-Century Funerary Sculpture
Paul Binski, Keynote Speaker (Professor of the History of Medieval Art History : University of Cambridge) Medieval Invention and its Potencies
Kerry Paul Boeye (Assistant Professor of Art History : Loyola University Maryland) Iconographic Invention in Thirteenth- and early Fourteenth-Century English Psalters
Alexandrina Buchanan (Lecturer in Archive Studies : University of Liverpool) Gained in Translation: Architectural Drawing and Three-Dimensional Geometry
Andrew Budge (PhD Candidate, Birkbeck College : University of London) The Fourteenth rebuilding of the Collegiate Church of St Mary Warwick: Risk-taking Innovation or Simple Fashion Statement?
James Alexander Cameron (PhD Candidate : Courtauld Institute of Art) The Englishness of English Sedilla
Kristen Collins (Associate Curator, Department of Manuscripts : Getty Museum) Resonance and Reuse: The Reinvention of a Late-Romanesque Vita Christi in Fifteenth-Century East Anglia
Lloyd De Beer (Project Curator, Late Medieval Collections : The British Museum) The Key of David and the Temple of Justice: An Analysis of the Chichester Seal Matrix
Veronica Decker (Art History Department : University of Vienna) The Patronage of William of Wykeham: Imagination and Experimentation in Fourteenth-Century Art and Architecture
Emily Guerry (Junior Research Fellow in History of Art, Merton College : University of Oxford) Picturing the Saints: Relics, Patronage and the “Westminster Court Style” in Gothic Cult Painting
Jack Hartnell (Postdoctoral Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin/ Victoria and Albert Museum) The Wound Man and the English Medical Imagination
James Hillson (PhD Candidate : University of York) Iterative Invention: Delayed Design in Dynastic Gothic at St Stephen’s Chapel Westminster and Norwich Cathedral Cloister
Aden Kumler, Keynote Speaker (Associate Professor of Art History and the College : University of Chicago) Envisioning Art as Process in Medieval Britain
Helen Lunnon (Tutor in Art History : University of East Anglia) Inventio Porticus
Julian Luxford (Reader in Art History : University of St Andrews) Inscribed Churches in Late Medieval England
John Munns (Lecturer in the History of Medieval Art : University of Cambridge) Seeing Things: from Art to Apparition in the High Middle Ages
Laura Slater (Post Doctoral Researcher and Teaching Assistant, Department of Art History : University of York) Inventing and Imagining Place: Jerusalems in England and the Case of Westminster
Roger Stalley (Professor Emeritus of the History of Art : Trinity College) Reason and Imagination in English Gothic Architecture
For further information, see the conference website: http://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/146/
Autumn School Latin Paleography and Medieval Liturgy University of Ghent, 20 – 22 October 2014 Application deadline: 31 August 2014
This Autumn School is organised for MA and PhD-students in Medieval Studies (art history, history, philosophy, literature, music, etc.) who are required to work with handwritten medieval documents in Latin or with liturgical sources and texts containing liturgical quotations or references.
The Autumn School starts with two days of parallel courses in Latin Paleography and Medieval Liturgy, taught by leading experts in the field.
The sessions about Medieval Liturgy focus, after an elaborate introduction to the various liturgical books, on the liturgical conventions in France and Germany, on liturgy and music, on liturgy and architecture and on books of hours.
The sessions about Latin paleography explain the interactions between paleography, Diplomatics and Codicology, and will then focus ondifferent scripts, the evolution and layout of the page and reading practices, the organisation of the scriptoria and the position of the scribe.
On the third day of the course, workshops are organized for each theme, in which all topics dealt with during the previous days will be brought together in an interactive session.
In the space of three days, students will thus acquire a basic knowledge of either Latin Paleography or Medieval Liturgy as well the skills to implement this knowledge in their own research projects.
For the course on Latin Paleography, students need to have already a basic knowledge of (classical) Latin grammar and vocabulary. For the course in Medieval Liturgy, no previous knowledge is required.
Both courses are delivered in English. Since both courses are taught at the same time, participants can enrol for only one course.
For further information on programme and registration, see here.
I. Conference Reminder Gothic Ivories: Content and Context Saturday 5 July 2014, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London Sunday 6 July 2014, The British Museum, London
Jointly organised by The British Museum and The Courtauld Gothic Ivories Project, this event follows on from the successful 2012 conference Gothic Ivories: Old Questions New Directions (V&A – Courtauld). Celebrating new research on Gothic ivory carving, papers will focus on a wide range of topics arising from the study of Gothic ivory carving and Embriachi pieces, related to the themes of content and context.
Themed sessions will be dedicated to questions of iconography, sources and original use and context, research into provenance, relationships with other media, ivory carving in the 16th century, history of collecting in the 19th and 20th century.
For the full programme, see here. Online booking now availablehere.
II. Special Issue The Sculpture Journal New Work on Old Bones (with papers from the 2012 Gothic ivories conference) For the table of contents, see here.
For further news from the world of Gothic ivories, see the news-section on the website of the Gothic Ivories project.
The Friends of the Warburg Institute have launched the following petition which may be of interest to those who know about the Warburg Institute and have benefited from its wonderful library:
“The Times Higher Education recently reported that the University of London has taken legal action to challenge its own deed of trust concerning the care and integrity of the Warburg Institute. Possible results of this action include the dispersal of the library, or its relocation abroad.
This is not the first timethe Institute has been threatened: it was relocated from Hamburg to London in 1933, endangered by Hitler’s rise to power, and although the University of London accepted the collections in 1944 (the agreement currently under review), similar action was considered in 2010.
We call on the University of London to withdraw their legal action and keep the Warburg Institute just as it is, for three reasons:
1. To keep the Warburg Institute’s collections intact. In over 50 years since the library’s resettlement in London, it has grown from 80,000 to 350,000 volumes, 40% of which are unique and not held in the British Library.
2. To preserve Aby Warburg’s intellectual legacy. The Institute’s collections are organised unlike any other in the world – according to a system developed by Warburg as a product of his own research. Dispersal is tantamount to destroying one of Warburg’s greatest works of scholarship – the library itself.
3. To maintain the vibrant intellectual community the Warburg fosters. A one-of-a-kind collection both in content and form, the Warburg has drawn together a world-class scholarly community for decades. Taking the collections outside of the space of the Institute would displace that community of researchers.”
To sign the petition, please follow this link.
For a statement from the Warburg Institute regarding the High Court proceedings, click here.
Conference Commemoration of the Dead: new approaches, new perspectives, new material London, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet Street Saturday, 15 November 2014, 10am – 5pm
Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth in new research and consideration of commemorative brasses and funerary monuments. This one-day joint meeting, sponsored by the Monumental Brass Society and the Church Monuments Society, will explore these developments and, in particular, research techniques that have led to new insights within the broader context of funerary art. Speakers are primarily doctoral and early post-doctoral students.
9.30 Registration
10.00 Welcome by Christian Steer, Hon. Secretary, Monumental Brass Society
10.05 Richard Marks: ‘Brass and Glass’: the medieval tomb window
10.45 Session 1: Reassessing Workshops
Matthew Ward: Late Medieval Style: the Role of Agency and the Workshop
Michael Carter: The Mysterious Mitre on the Monument
11.45 Tea/coffee
12.15 Session 2: Form and Materials
Sanne Frequin: Tournai Stone: an investigation of materiality Ann Adams: ‘Revealed and Concealed’: Monumental Brasses on High Relief Tombs – the examples of John I, Duke of Cleves and Catherine of Bourbon
13.15 Lunch (own arrangements)
14.30 Session 3: Contextualising Brasses – Politics, Family and Religion
Harriette Peel: Women, Children and Guardian Angels in Late Medieval Flemish Funerary Art Jessica Knowles: ‘Controlling the Past’: the Medieval Brasses of All Saints North Street, York
15.30 Tea/coffee
16.00 Session 4: Lost Brasses
Robert Marcoux: The Social Meaning and Artistic Potential of a Medium: Brass and the Medieval Tombs of the Gaignières Collection Christian Steer: ‘A Melting Pot of Death’: Burials and Brasses in the London Grey Friars
17.00 Concluding Remarks: Martin Stuchfield, President, M.B.S., and Jean Wilson, President, C.M.S.
Registration:
It is anticipated that this event will be extremely popular and a pre-booked registration process is necessary for those who would like to attend. There is a strict capacity limit and places will be allocated on a ‘first come, first served’ basis. Early booking is encouraged. The event is free for members of the Monumental Brass Society and Church Monuments Society but members are required to reserve a place by contacting the Hon. Secretary of the M.B.S. (details below) well in advance. Non-members are warmly welcome and to reserve a place should send a cheque for £15.00, made payable to the Monumental Brass Society, to the Hon. Secretary (see below). A special rate of £5.00 is available for student non-members. All delegates must pre-book in advance.
Refreshments:
There will be a morning and afternoon tea and coffee break available for delegates but lunch is not included. This area of Bloomsbury is well served with cafes, restaurants and pubs where lunch can be obtained.
To book:
To book a place, please write/email the Hon. Secretary of the Monumental Brass Society:
Dr Christian Steer
8 Shefford Lodge Newbury, Berkshire RG14 7LR
e: christianosteer@yahoo.co.uk
Please indicate whether you are a member of the M.B.S. or CMS at booking.
Non-members should enclose a cheque for £15.00 (£5.00 for students) made payable to the Monumental Brass Society.
It is intended to publish a list of delegate names and email addresses. Please indicate at the time of booking whether you do not wish your email address to be included.
ABY WARBURG AND NATURE Workshop, University of Hamburg, Warburg-Haus, 15 – 16 January 2015 Deadline: 31 August 2014
Organizers: Frank Fehrenbach and Cornelia Zumbusch (University of Hamburg)
Aby Warburg’s references to enlivenment, life forces, and the afterlife of images are evidence for the paradigmatic meaning of the natural for his conceptualization of the emergence and re-emergence of pictorial formulas. From wind and the bewegtes Beiwerk (‘accessory in motion’) in his dissertation on Botticelli, to stars in his studies on astrology, to lightning in his lecture on snake rituals, nature surfaces again and again in his work as an image-generating entity. Warburg himself systematically addressed the connections between art and nature; it is thus all the more surprising that this aspect of Warburg’s work has been the subject of so little research. Warburg’s ‘pathos formulas’ anchor images to motor functions and the kinetics of the human body. His studies of expression, as well as his notion of a collective pictorial memory that nourished the visual arts from antiquity through the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, are clearly oriented towards anthropological, physiological and psychological models of human nature. Warburg thus identifies the basis of human image-making as an attempt to grasp the ‘moved life’ of the natural, against the background of conceptions and descriptive means drawn from natural magic, natural philosophy, and the natural sciences.
Warburg’s basic project to link the study of the visual arts with cultural studies is itself strongly related to natural scientific models of his time. This can be seen in his idiosyncratic, often tentative adoptions of such terms and contaminations as mneme (mnemonic traces that operate in the life of images); Erbgut and Erbmasse (‘inheritance’; ‘hereditary mass’); kinetic and potential energy; dynamogram (a kind of ‘energetic sign’); engram (‘energetic’ mnemonic traces); and Energiekonserve (‘canned energy’). It is to these areas that our workshop wishes to apply itself – not simply to plumb the capacity and range of Warburg’s vocabulary, but rather to take a closer look at his intersecting of cultural studies and the natural sciences. What methodological status do genetics, evolutionary biology, social psychology, affect psychology, or even physics or mathematics have for Warburg’s understanding of images? What role do Warburg’s own systems of record, his sketches and formulas, play in all this? Is the importing of abstract concepts and models from the natural sciences just a matter of ‘nice analogies’, as Saxl would have us believe – or can we lay bare an epistemology of transfer between cultural studies and the natural sciences which could also be illuminating for current fluctuations between the two?
Please submit your proposal of no more than 300 words and a short CV to naturbilder@uni-hamburg.de by August 31, 2014.
Medieval Art Research 