Medieval Art Research

Online Seminar: ‘The library of the Marquis of Santillana (d. 1458) and the cultural networks of the European Renaissance’, with Rosa M. Rodríguez Porto, Zurbarán Centre-ARTES Research Seminar, 20 February 2023, 18.00 (GMT)

This talk will focus on an analysis of the books collected by Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana, one of the most prominent figures of early Castilian Humanism. Although the relevance of his library was already acknowledged in a pioneering study by Mario Schiff in 1905, art historians have tended to pay more attention to the manuscripts produced for Santillana in Castile. And yet, the books he acquired or commissioned in France and, most notably, Italy, allow us to reconstruct the dense network of political, family and cultural connections behind his eclectic patronage, and to understand how his leading role in the introduction of new visual languages in Castile granted him a towering position among the other Castilian magnates.

Biography: Rosa M. Rodríguez Porto is Ramón y Cajal Fellow at the University of Santiago de Compostela and Adjunct Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Southern Denmark. She has extensively worked on late medieval book illumination, on medieval Iberian courtly art and on the Classical tradition in the Middle Ages. Her latest publication is “La biblioteca del Marqués de Santillana”, for the catalogue of the exhibition El Marqués de Santillana: Imágenes y letras at the Museo Nacional del Prado and the Biblioteca Nacional de España, from 4 and 5 Oct 2022 to 8 January 2023.

The event is part of the Research Seminar series organised by the Zurbarán Centre with the ARTES Iberian and Latin American Visual Culture Group. The series provides an open forum for engaging with innovative research and exhibition projects relating to the visual arts in the Hispanic world.

To join the seminar, please click on this zoom link (or copy and paste it into your browser ):

https://durhamuniversity.zoom.us/j/93702971057?pwd=TW9raVNlM1pxaHFkdGFueURvaWVrZz09

Meeting ID: 937 0297 1057
Passcode: 612894

More information can be found here.

Feature image: Cicerón De officiis, Biblioteca Nacional de España MS Res. 23

PhD Position: Portraying Medieval Women: The Materiality of Female Images and Art Patronage in the Latin East (12th-15th centuries). University of Fribourg. (Deadline: February 20th, 2023)

Description:

The SNSF PRIMA Project Portraying Medieval Women: The Materiality of Female Images and Art Patronage in the Latin East (12th–15th centuries) (https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/208477), hosted at the Chair of Medieval Art History at the University of Fribourg, offers a four-year doctoral position focused on female representations and patronage in Southern Italy under Latin rule (12th–15th century). Her/his dissertation will be dedicated in the compilation of a comprehensive catalogue of the extant material in the assigned territories

The most important task of the PhD researcher will be the carrying out of original research and the completion of her/his dissertation. Moreover, she/he is expected to actively participate in all the project’s research activities and scientific events, such as workshops, conferences and research trips.

Qualifications :

MA in Art History with specialization in Medieval or Byzantine Art
Proficiency in Italian
Very good language skills in English
Good command of French and/or German

Contact Information

Asst. Prof. Rafca Nasr, rafca.nasr@unifr.ch

For more information please click here.

Call for Papers: The Middle Ages in Modern Games Twitter Conference: Fantasy and Apocalypse (Deadline: 9 April 2023)

The Public Medievalist and the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Research at the University of Winchester present The Fourth Middle Ages in Modern Games Twitter Conference (@MidAgesModGames, #MAMG23) on 6 to 9 June 2023. The central themes of this year’s event are ‘Fantasy’ and ‘Apocalypse’.

Fantasy and Apocalypse are closely tied to medievalist games. Pseudo-medieval worlds are by far the most common setting for fantasy games from Dungeons and Dragons to World of Warcraft. Meanwhile, many games with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic settings such as Fallout and Torment: Tides of Numenera make use of medieval tropes to build their worlds. These settings are clearly removed from the Middle Ages, but are nevertheless fundamentally medieval and can strongly influence modern perceptions of the period.

This conference considers the Medieval and Medievalism in Modern Games. We invite ‘papers’ (comprising a thread of 12 Tweets) and sessions of 3 to 5 papers which address any aspects of the medieval period or medievalism in any and all forms of modern games. We particularly welcome papers addressing the central conference themes of ‘Fantasy’ and ‘Apocalypse’. The conference will be conducted remotely and there will be no registration fee. To promote accessibility and inclusivity, the event runs asynchronously across time zones. Topics may include (but are not restricted to):

The End of the World in Medievalist Games
Fantasy Games beyond Western Europe
Post-Apocalyptic Feudalism
Medieval and Fantasy Mechanics in Sci-Fi Worlds
Magic and Technology
Gender and Sexuality in Fantasy and Apocalyptic Worlds
‘Historical Accuracy’ in Fantasy Games
Boundaries between Fantasy and Medievalism
Constructing and Portraying Nuanced Fantasy Races
Building Pseudo-Medieval Worlds
Literary and Audio-Visual Influences
Teaching through Fantasy and Apocalyptic Games
Heterogeneity and Diversity in Fantasy Games
Chronological and Genre limits of Medievalism

We encourage submissions from medievalists, and games scholars and developers at any point in their career— especially those from Postgraduate Students, Early Career Researchers and members of any groups under-represented within the academy and industry. We welcome pieces addressing any region globally, and within a broad definition of ‘medieval’ and ‘medievalism’.

Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words, brief biographies, and indications of time zone and availability as attachments in Word to Robert.Houghton@Winchester.ac.uk by Friday 9 April.

Call for Papers: Conques at the Crossroads of Histories: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Deadline: 15 February 2023)

The aim of this conference is to collectively rethink the cultural, material, and performative history of Conques-en-Rouergue. Despite being a site of major importance with a millennium of accumulated history, premodern Conques has often been the object of sectorial studies: specialists in architecture have been interested in the abbey church, historians of visual culture in the sculpted tympanum, historians of material culture in the goldsmith’s objects or in the treasure, and historians in the practical documents or in the hagiography. Musicologists have studied associated songs and liturgical performances. Philologists or literary historians have studied the famous Liber miraculorum sancte fidis, the Cançon de santa Fe and other texts related to the cult of the saint in Conques.

Beyond the premodern, the history of Conques in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been an object of study only for divergent fields: religious history, history of heritage and conservation, and histories of the construction of a national or European narrative. Fields such as environmental sciences, topography or historical geography have yet to be integrated in a more organic way into the history of this site. These various approaches have too rarely interacted, leaving comprehensive knowledge of this site incomplete and marred by a web of disconnected historiographies.

With this call for papers, we would like to rectify this disciplinary divide by inviting researchers to Conques to rethink the site together, through a living, organic debate that goes beyond linguistic and national borders. We welcome contributors from all disciplines but ask that their contributions be conceived in such a way that they can be understood and integrated by researchers from divergent backgrounds, which may require explication of disciplinary givens. Multi-voiced papers prepared by researchers from different disciplinary and linguistic backgrounds are particularly welcome. The expected disciplines are not limited to those mentioned above, on the contrary, participants specialized in environmental science, biology, archaeogenetics or other disciplines are warmly invited.

The symposium will be held at the Centre Européen of Conques from October 11 to 13, 2023. The organization will cover the costs of accommodation and meals, and at least part of the travel expenses (depending on actual costs). This conference is conducted within the framework of the MSCA-Rise project Conques in the Global World (https://conques.eu/).

Researchers wishing to contribute are invited to send their proposal, including a title, an abstract (about 200 words) and a short biography, to adrien.palladino@phil.muni.cz before February 15, 2023.

Online Lecture: Responding Icons and Miraculous Images? Is There a Theology for Mosaics? by Liz James, 9 February 2023, 12:00pm EST

Mosaic, Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem. Photo: Liz James

The Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture is pleased to announce the next lecture in its 2022–2023 lecture series.

The ‘theology of icons’ is well-discussed in Byzantine Studies: the role that religious images played in Byzantine life; the relationships between the icon, the worshipper and the divine; debates about the representation of the divine. How do these ideas play out with mosaics however, which are not easy to understand as live lines of communication with the divine in the same way that icons (when understood as panel paintings) are? How can we think about mosaics as icons, or is this the wrong question?

Liz James is a Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex

Advance registration required at https://maryjahariscenter.org/events/responding-icons-and-miraculous-images

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Harvard University Standing Committee on Medieval Studies. Contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture with any questions.

Call for Papers – Cultures of Skin: Skin in Literature and Culture, Past, Present, Future (Deadline: 1 February 2023)

This conference brings together scholars working on literary and cultural representations of skin, across historical periods and transnational contexts, to create new dialogues on the cultural meanings of skin from the past through to the present day, and consider the current and future state of the field(s) of skin studies.

Building on an earlier set of enquiries that initiated skin studies in the early 2000s – with key works including Claudia Benthien’s Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and the World (1999); Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey’s Thinking through the Skin (2001); and Steven Connor’s The Book of Skin (2004) – in recent years there has been renewed interest in examining the cultural representations of skin within a variety of cultural texts and media. Scholars have worked across historical and contemporary time periods, engaging with key concepts around identity and embodiment, agency and performativity, temporality and spatiality, and in relation to discourses of race, class, gender, and sexuality, health and illness. Literary and cultural scholarship has been instrumental in advancing theoretical and methodological approaches to the skin as historically variable and culturally constituted, building up a rich picture of “cultures of skin” from the past to the present day. This represents an exciting moment to consider the state of skin studies now, and to anticipate future directions for the field.

In this conference we seek to establish international dialogue among scholars working on a range of contexts and concepts around the skin, to consider thematic and conceptual avenues as well as methodological and theoretical approaches to the skin. We invite scholars working on literary and cultural representations of skin, from any historical period or national/cultural perspective, to submit abstracts on themes including but by no means limited to:

skin as text, texts as skin
skin and/as the self, skin and identity
skin texture, porosity, permeability
skin colour and race
skin as thing/material object and in relation to the material world
animal/nonhuman skins
skin care and cosmetics throughout history
technologies of the skin, future skin
skin as a medium of artistic representation/performance
skin damage and modification – wounding, scarring, tattoos
skin in relation to health and illness
the geographies of skin moving through space
methodological and theoretical approaches to studying and working on skin
state of the field reflections, the future of skin studies

Abstracts of 250-300 words should be submitted by 1st February 2023 by emailing culturalskinstudies@gmail.com. Decisions will be communicated by early March. The conference is being planned on a hybrid basis, with in-person attendance at the University of Surrey (Guildford, UK) accompanied by virtual attendance options. We gratefully acknowledge funding support from the British Academy.

Organised by Dr Charlotte Mathieson (Surrey) and Dr Nicole Nyffenegger (Bern), co-convenors of the Cultural Skin Studies network: for more information and to join our mailing list or quarterly online reading group, please visit https://www.culturalskinstudies.com

News: Access to the Index of Medieval Art Database Will Become Free on 1 July 2023

Jongleurs from the Silos Beatus, 1091–1109 (London, British Library, MS Add. 11695), fol. 86r.

We’re very pleased to announce that as of July 1, 2023, a paid subscription will no longer be required for access to the Index of Medieval Art database. This transition was made possible by a generous grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the support of the Index’s parent department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University.

Currently, the Index of Medieval Art database, accessed at this link https://theindex.princeton.edu/, can be browsed through its open access lists, as well as searched with keywords. Researchers can learn more about our coverage through the browse function on the database, including over twenty thousand unique terms for iconographic subjects in medieval art, and plan to attend one of our upcoming info sessions.

Stay up to date with our news by following us on social media at Facebook and Twitter: @imaprinceton. Index staff also remain available for researcher questions via our online form at https://ima.princeton.edu/research-inquiries/.

Please read more about our momentous shift to online open access in a recent blog post written by director Pamela Patton, “Access to the Index of Medieval Art Database Will Become Free on July 1, 2023.” The Index of Medieval Art (blog). January 12, 2023. Thank you for your ongoing support and interest in our activities!

Online Lecture: Imagining the Medieval City (Saturday 25 Feb 2023)

Join the London Medieval Society as we explore cities in the Middle Ages. The programme of the day is as follows:

10:10 Virtual Meeting Room Opens
10.20 Welcome and Introduction
10.30 Catherine Clarke (IHR) ‘Bishop Ralph Baldock Visits Swansea: Creative Microhistory and the Medieval City’
11:15 Break
11:30 Keith Lilley (Queen’s University Belfast) ‘Founding a City, Founding a World: Imagining and Imaging ‘New Towns’ of the Middle Ages’
12:15 Lunch
13:15 Pietro Mocchi (Kent) ‘From Gate to Gate: City Life in Late-Medieval Milan and Public History’
14:00 Christian Liddy (Durham) ‘Bayard of Walsall and his Thousand Colts: an English town goes European’
14:45 Round Table
15:15 End of Event

The event will take place over Zoom; tickets to the event can be booked here or by visiting EventBrite. Please note you will be sent an email with the Zoom link on the morning of the event.

Call for Applicants: Juan Facundo Riaño Essay Prize (Deadline: 31st January 2023)

ARTES invite submissions for the Juan Facundo Riaño Essay Prize for the best art-historical essay on a Spanish theme. The deadline is 31st January 2023

To encourage emerging scholars that are based in the UK, ARTES, in collaboration with the Embassy of Spain, awards an annual essay medal to the author of the best art-historical essay or study on a Spanish theme, which must be submitted in competition and judged by a reading Sub-Committee. The medal is named after Juan Facundo Riaño (1829-1901), the distinguished art historian who was partly responsible for a growing interest in Spanish culture in late nineteenth-century Britain. The winner is also awarded a cash prize of £400, and the runner-up is awarded a certificate and prize of £100 – both prizes are generously sponsored by the Office for Cultural and Scientific Affairs of the Embassy of Spain. Prize-winners also receive a year’s free membership to ARTES, and the winning essays are considered for publication in the annual visual arts issue of Hispanic Research Journal. See the information about eligibility and rules of competition. The deadline is 31st January 2023.

Entering the Essay Competition

The judges will be looking for evidence of originality of thought and high academic quality. Submissions must focus on the production or reception of the art, architecture or visual culture of Spain. Alternative contributions in the form of photo or video essays will also be considered, provided that they demonstrate originality, high academic quality and high production standards.

As a permanent reminder of the winner’s achievement, an essay medal is awarded, together with a cash prize of £400. The winning essay will be considered for publication in the annual visual arts issue of Hispanic Research Journal. The runner-up receives a prize of £100, and an essay so commended may also be considered for publication in Hispanic Research Journal. Both prize-winners also receive a year’s free membership to ARTES.

Essays are submitted by 31 January each year, and are read by the Essay Medal Committee, appointed by ARTES. The decision of the Committee shall be final. Presentation of the medal is usually made at a special ceremony in London in Summer of the same year, and the result is announced on the ARTES website.

Previous Winners

2022: Patricia Manzano Rodríguez, a PhD candidate at the University of Durham, for ‘The Upper half of Las Meninas’.
2021: Diana Bularca, formerly a MA student at the Courtauld, for ‘Wilfredo Lam’s Strategic Language’
2020: Dr Simon Park, an early career scholar at the University of Oxford, for ‘Chasing Wild Men (in Silver)’.
2019: No award
2018: Javier Vicente Arenas, a Masters student at the Warburg Institute, for ‘Constructing a “Transmediterranean” Identity: Rodrigo de Borgia’s Italian Angels in Valencia Cathedral (1472-81)’.
2017: David Cambronero, a MA student at The Courtauld, for ‘Lighting the Great Mosque of Cordoba in the Caliphal Period’.
2016: Leah McBride, a PhD student at Glasgow University, for ‘‘The grave is only half full; who will help us fill it?’: The Politics of Trauma in Alfredo Jaar’s Rwanda Project‘.
2015: Rebekah Lee, a PhD student at the University of York, for ‘Catherine of Austria, Queen of Portugal and the Courtly Portrayal of Middle Age’.
2014: Lesley Thornton-Cronin, a first year PhD student at Glasgow University, for ‘Image-Making by Means of Metaphoric Transposition in the Work of Joan Miró’.
2013: Maite Usoz, a third year PhD student at King’s College, London, for ‘Sex and the City: Urban Eroticism in Rodrigo Muñoz Ballester’s Manuel Series’.

Regulations for the Essay Medal

1. Entrants should ideally be resident or studying in the UK, but exceptions may be made if entrants can demonstrate sustained engagement with students, scholars, objects or materials in the UK.

2. There is no age limit for entrants, but the Essay Medal Committee reserves the right to give preference to entrants who have not previously published in the field of Hispanic visual arts. We welcome submissions from researchers in a variety of circumstances, but envisage that most essays will be submitted from early career scholars, post-graduate students or undergraduates with exceptionally good end-of-degree dissertations. Details of degrees or qualifications, as well as previous publications, must be submitted together with the submission (ie in the cover email, but not in the main text.

3. Visual arts are defined in their broadest sense to include all material and visual culture, including film and photography, but our collaboration with the Spanish Embassy means that essays must focus on the visual culture of Spain (or works originally produced in Spain or by Spanish artists).

4. The essay must not have been previously published and must not have been awarded any national or international prize. A note of any departmental prizes awarded to it should accompany the email by which the submission is sent.

5. Essays may be up to 10,000 words in length, including bibliography (though this is not not necessary if full footnotes are given), all notes and appendices. Shorter submissions will not be penalised on grounds of length, but overlength essays will be refused. A word count and a summary of up to 250 words (additional to the work total) must be included. Submissions in the form of photo essays or videos (up to 25 minutes in length) will also be considered.

6. The submission should demonstrate original thinking. It may be based on a dissertation, and may involve original research, although submissions based on a survey of secondary material will also be considered if they are of suitable quality. However, the submission should be self-contained and especially prepared for this competition.

7. Entries must be written in English and double-spaced. Diagrams or illustrations should be included and captioned. Sources of information and images must be acknowledged, together with information about image rights.

8. The winning essay may be considered for publication in the visual arts issue of Hispanic Research Journal, subject to the usual process of refereeing, and to acceptance by the Editors, whose decision on this is final. In the event of the essay being accepted for publication, some reworking may be required. Essays may not be offered for publication elsewhere while they are sub judice.

9. In the case of any dispute about the award, the decision of the ARTES Essay Medal Committee shall be final.

10. ARTES reserves the right to make no award if none of the entries is considered worthy.

11. The closing date for entries is 31st January each year. Essays received after this date will not be considered.

12. A PDF of the essay, including images, should be sent to tom.nickson@courtauld.ac.uk To ensure anonymity please do not put your name on the essay.

Any queries should be directed to tom.nickson@courtauld.ac.uk

New Publication: Natural Light in Medieval Churches, edited by Vladimir Ivanovici and Alice Isabella Sullivan, published by Brill

Inside Christian churches, natural light has long been harnessed to underscore theological, symbolic, and ideological statements. In this volume, twenty-four international scholars with various specialties explore how the study of sunlight can reveal essential aspects of the design, decoration, and function of medieval sacred spaces.

Themes covered include the interaction between patrons, advisors, architects, and artists, as well as local negotiations among competing traditions that yielded new visual and spatial constructs for which natural light served as a defining and unifying factor. The study of natural light in medieval churches reveals cultural relations, knowledge transfer patterns, processes of translation and adaptation, as well as experiential aspects of sacred spaces in the Middle Ages.

Contributors are: Anna Adashinskaya, Jelena Bogdanović, Debanjana Chatterjee, Ljiljana Čavić, Aleksandar Čučaković, Dušan Danilović, Magdalena Dragović, Natalia Figueiras Pimentel, Leslie Forehand, Jacob Gasper, Vera Henkelmann, Gabriel-Dinu Herea, Vladimir Ivanovici, Charles Kerton, Jorge López Quiroga, Anastasija Martinenko, Andrea Mattiello, Rubén G. Mendoza, Dimitris Minasidis, Maria Paschali, Marko Pejić, Iakovos Potamianos, Maria Shevelkina, Alice Isabella Sullivan, Travis Yeager, and Olga Yunak.

This volume is number 88 in the ‘East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450-1450’ series.

For more information and to order a copy, visit the Brill website.