‘The Guest of the Body – Visualising Souls in Medieval Europe, 1100-1200’, Shirin Fozi, 27th April 2022, 17:00-18:30 (BST)

‘The Guest of the Body – Visualising Souls in Medieval Europe, 1100-1200’
Shirin Fozi
The Courtault Institute via Zoom
27th April 2022
17:00-18:30 (BST)

The art of medieval Europe emphasizes the eschatological future in terms that can often surprise contemporary viewers.  Christian anxieties about the apocalypse – the longing for resurrection, the fear of eternal damnation, the hopes of attaining a place in paradise – hinged on the desire for a successful reunification of the bodies and souls of the dead.  These two aspects of the self were seen as diametrically opposed in many ways; the flawed, mortal, ephemeral reality of the body could not be more different than the abstract and ineffable qualities of its invisible pendant.  In order to represent these contrasts, however, medieval artists visualized the soul in forms that would be recognizable for their audiences, favoring the anthropomorphic soul that could take flight with the assistance of angels.  This talk looks at a series of medieval images, particularly funerary monuments, that reflect on the departure of the soul and emphasize its fraught relationship to the body that is left behind, and to which it shall return.  Even as bodies were present throughout medieval Christian spaces – buried in chapels and crypts, or raised as relics in altars and shrines – souls occupied a strange position in between presence and absence, dissolving deep divides between heaven and earth, or between the mundane experience of daily life and the end of days, that distant and yet rapidly approaching frontier of Christian time.

Shirin Fozi is Associate Professor in History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh.  She is the author of a monograph titled Romanesque Tomb Effigies: Death and Redemption in Medieval Europe, 1000-1200 (2021), which received a Millard Meiss Grant from the College Art Association, and co-editor of Christ on the Cross: The Boston Crucifix and the Rise of Medieval Wood Sculpture (2020).  Fozi has also published several articles on modern collections of medieval art, and her most recent Museum Studies seminar culminated in a student-curated online exhibition called A Nostalgic Filter: Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age (2020).

Organised by Dr Tom Nickson (The Courtauld) and Dr Jessica Barker (The Courtauld) 

Booking will open shortly via this link.

ICMA Pop-Up in Beaune, France on 19 March 2022 - Register today!

ICMA Pop-Up in Beaune, France

Le Bon, le Téméraire et le Chancelier - Quand flamboyait la Toison d’Or
Saturday 19 March 2022
14.00 - 18.00

Dear ICMA Members,

An ICMA Pop-Up event is taking place near you soon!

The exhibition Le Bon, le Téméraire et le Chancelier - Quand flamboyait la Toison d’Or in Beaune, is a major event in which artworks and objects from the Burgundian court in the 14th and 15th centuries are displayed in three locations in the city. On view are over one-hundred-and-fifty exhibits – including paintings, sculptures, goldsmith's and silversmith's work, tapestries, manuscripts, archival documents, and armor – from private and public collections in Europe. Taking place in buildings and spaces that were founded and used by members of the court, the exhibition emphasizes the three key figures of Duke Philip the Good (1396-1467), Duke Charles the Bald (1433-1477), and the chancellor Nicolas Rolin.

Le Bon, le Téméraire et le Chancelier closes on 31 March. Further information regarding the exhibition is found in this link.

You are invited to join other ICMA Members at the exhibition on Saturday 19 March, from 14:00 until 18:00.

This gathering is informal:

  • Attendees are responsible for their own travel bookings, museum reservations & admission fees, and compliance with local pandemic restrictions.

  • The purpose of this event is to introduce ICMA members from the area to one another, to strengthen the social and professional ties in our community, and to celebrate our mutual interest in medieval art, while exploring the exhibition together.

  • The event organizer, Masha Goldin, will be in touch with those who register with details on meet up spots.

Please register HERE. We hope to see you there!

For inquiries, please contact Masha Goldin, ICMA Membership Committee: masha.goldin@unibas.ch


Organized by
Masha Goldin

Register HERE

Views from the Inside: Inclusion, Diversity and Equity in the Editing and Publishing of Peer-Reviewed Journals - 7 February 2022 at 5pm ET - register today!

Join us for the second of three workshops on inclusion, diversity and equity in the editing and publishing of peer-reviewed journals. Presentations will focus on the mechanics, ethics, and economics of journal publishing, including the organization and distribution of labor within journal publications; the many people involved in editing and production; the costs of processes; the roles and challenges of digital platforms; the respective advantages and disadvantages of open access vs. firewall, etc. The workshop will also discuss the relationships between journals and their sponsoring or hosting institutions. This event will take place virtually.

 

https://sofheyman.org/events/views-from-the-inside-inclusion-diversity-and-equity-in-the-editing-and-publishing-of-peer-reviewed-journals

 

The link to register is here. Registrants who attended the October 18, 2021 workshop will receive a link automatically and do not need to re-register.

Panelists:
Susan Boynton (organizer) coeditor of Gesta
Callum Blackmore, editor of Current Musicology
Alex Gil and Kaiama Glover, coeditors of archipelagos
Michelle Wilson (Digital Publishing, Columbia University Libraries)
Shannon Wearing (University of Toronto, managing editor of RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics)
----------------------------------------------------

The third and final workshop will take place on April 4, 2022: Working towards Equity and Inclusion in Journal Publication: What does it take to make journal publishing function more inclusively and transparently? In this workshop, participants will discuss their perspectives on future paths for greater equity and inclusion in authorship, the division of labor, peer review, the constitution of editorial boards, and consider the ways in which journals can foster the diversity of all participants. Presenters will address the ways in which institutional contexts (universities, university presses, scholarly societies) shape journal operations, and consider how the relationships between journals and institutions can lead to support for enhanced inclusion and equity.

Change or Be Changed: Designing Solutions for Challenges Facing the Humanities and Social Sciences, an ACLS discussion on 10 February. Registration required.

What can we do to help humanistic studies thrive?  In the Luce Design Workshop at ACLS, teams from six schools developed practical solutions to the challenges we face, from declining undergraduate enrollments to faculty diversification. Our lesson: great experiments are going on around the country, but change must be ambitious, connected, systemic, and swift. This event showcases their results and sets the stage for further exchange and collaboration.

The aim of the event is to make our work visible, to invite collaboration and exchange with others trying to bring about change in the academy, and to determine together what collaborative work is needed (transcending any single organization or initiative) to bring about systemic change.


Moderated by Joy Connolly, ACLS President and James Shulman, ACLS Vice President and Chief Operating Officer.

Speakers:

  • Jasmine Alinder, Dean of Humanities and Professor, Department of History, University of California, Santa Cruz

  • Amy Cook, Associate Dean for Research and Innovation, College of Arts and Sciences and Professor, Department of English, Stony Brook University

  • Christopher Heath “Kit” Wellman, Dean of Academic Planning for the College of Arts & Sciences and Professor, Department of Philosophy, Washington University in St. Louis

  • Ari Kelman, Chancellor’s Leadership Professor, Department of History, University of California, Davis

  • Claire M. Waters, Professor and Chair, Department of English, University of California, Davis

  • Maria J. Donoghue Velleca, Dean, Faculty of Arts & Sciences, Professor, Department of Biology, College of William & Mary

Special thanks to Treviene Harris for her work and assistance.


REGISTER HERE.

Two ICMA members awarded book prizes at College Art Association and Medieval Academy

The ICMA congratulates Elina Gertsman and Joan Holladay for their recent book awards.

Charles Rufus Morey Book Award  - College Art Association

Elina Gertsman, The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books, Penn State University Press, 2021.

Countering the customary interpretation of late medieval art as relentlessly profuse and exuberant, Elina Gertsman’s The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books, explores different constructions of emptiness ranging from the presentation of voids in illustrations to represent the unrepresentable to the deliberate inclusion of physical holes in manuscript pages designed to reveal portions of other pages. Gertsman’s investigation of the “fecundity of emptiness” is a generative and compelling topic for scholars of art history/visual studies across areas, both within and outside Medieval Studies. She argues and demonstrates that, between 1200s and 1500s, the broad circulation of scientific thought and its engagement with theology and formal and literary discourses on emptiness, absence, and negation account for visual, cognitive, and material expressions on the pages of medieval books. Cross-disciplinary in its approach, Gertsman’s book simultaneously draws attention to the visual and material aspects of the manuscripts, phenomenological experience, and philosophical, religious, and scientific theories of the period. In doing so she uncovers an unexpected kinship between the medieval artists and the modernist avant-garde, where the void is regarded as the locus of the sublime and of boundless possibility. Her erudite writing and compelling approach to the subject poses questions throughout that magnify the relevance of her study and stimulate personal inquiry—as a reader reflects on other areas of consideration across time called out in the text. The book is lavishly illustrated and artfully designed with a shape and size complementary to the subject of study.  

Committee: 
John Cunnally, Iowa State University 
Christina Hellmich, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco 
Laura Anne Kalba, University of Minnesota
Lisa D. Schrenk, University of Arizona 
Dorothy Wong, University of Virginia (Chair) 

2022 Karen Gould Book Prize in Art History - Medieval Academy of America

Joan Holladay, Genealogy and the Politics of Representation in the High and Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2019)

This is the first book to deal exclusively with medieval genealogical imagery. While paying attention to historical precedents in Roman and Carolingian times, and covering a wide range of examples in multiple media, Joan Holladay does full justice to a distinctive and important visual genre which, from the twelfth century, developed rapidly across medieval Europe. Through diagrams, monumental painted cycles, tomb sculpture and stained glass, the author’s sweeping and authoritative analysis is driven by admirable attention to the structural and formal qualities of the imagery, which throughout the book emerge as a visual genre in their own right. Equally focused on the genre’s ideological dimensions, Holladay persuasively demonstrates, for example, how genealogical imagery was produced to solidify lineal claims -- both real and imagined -- and assist memory in contexts of discontinuity and stress in transition lines. By touching on a great variety of stimulating topics, this fluently written and generously illustrated book offers a unique and seminal contribution to the field, one destined to inspire a broad interdisciplinary audience of medievalists.

ICMA ANNOUNCES THE 2021 ICMA ANNUAL BOOK PRIZE RECIPIENT

ICMA ANNUAL BOOK PRIZE


WE ARE DELIGHTED TO ANNOUNCE THE RECIPIENT OF THE 2021 ICMA ANNUAL BOOK PRIZE:

JESSICA BARKER
STONE FIDELITY: MARRIAGE AND EMOTION IN MEDIEVAL TOMB SCULPTURE

Boydell Studies in Medieval Art and Architecture, Boydell Press, 2020.
Click here for the Boydell site

Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in medieval England, double tomb brass memorials and recumbent effigies of couples supplied far more than monuments to deceased lay patrons or matrons. The double tomb, as Jessica Barker compellingly argues in this first holistic volume devoted to the topic, Stone Fidelity: Marriage and Emotion in Medieval Tomb Sculpture, materializes entangled records of fluid social boundaries during an age of social transformation following the Black Death. These funerary monuments complicate biographical readings as the depicted are diachronically to be counted both amongst the living and the dead, supply the mise-en-scène for grief and public funerary practices, and commemorate multiple marital unions or various forms of homosocial and perhaps even homosexual bonds. Rather than pure funerary monuments, double tombs by their very nature became sites of veneration recalling the exploits of deceased royals, extreme dissonance as surviving spouses witnessed their effigies for up to a generation, and an idealized fantasy of affective devotion, as both pre- and postmortem couples clutched to medieval funerary tradition and often one another. This impeccably researched book offers a pristine model of how a kaleidoscopic, holistic reexamination of medieval funerary practice, and in particular the visual culture of the double tomb, can unveil the affections and aspirations of late medieval men and women, resurrect portions of their lost identities, exemplify the legal bonds of medieval matrimony, and empathetically invigorate the changing theological and socio-political ideals to which these funerary monuments allude.

We thank the ICMA Book Prize Jury:
Eric Ramirez-Weaver (Chair), Péter Bokody, Till-Holger Borchert, Dorothy Glass, and Julie Harris

Symposium—Rethinking the Wearable in the Middle Ages, 28–29 April

Symposium—Rethinking the Wearable in the Middle Ages

28–29 April

Bard Graduate Center

Location: Zoom

More information

Covering, protecting, and adorning the body count among the most fundamental of human concerns, at once conveying aspects of an individual’s persona while also situating a person within a given social context. Wearable adornment encompasses materials fashioned by human hands (like fabric, metalwork, or even animal bones) and modifications to the body itself (such as tattoos, cosmetics, or hairstyles), which beautify the body while simultaneously conveying social, political and protective functions and meanings. The wearable is thus the most representational and at the same time most intimate product of material culture.

This conference seeks to expand our current understanding of the wearable in the Middle Ages. Current scholarship on the topic in Byzantine, western medieval, Eurasian art, as well as Islamic traditions tends to encompass clothing and jewelry, and is frequently medium-specific, with minimal regard to the interrelatedness of different aspects of appearance. On the one hand, work on medieval textiles has tended to approach questions of identity, consumption, and appearance by comparing textual sources and visual depictions with surviving textiles. The study of medieval jewelry, on the other hand, largely focuses on the classification and attribution of precious metal pieces from excavations and museum collections, as scholars make sense of pieces long removed from the bodies they once adorned. Tattoos, prosthetics, cosmetics and headgear are almost entirely absent in our understandings of medieval dress practices. This separation was not always so, however, and indeed nineteenth-century art historians such as Gottfried Semper integrated all aspects of bodily adornment in their considerations of the nature of ornamentation and surface decoration.

This conference will reimagine the wearable in similarly holistic terms. Bringing together varied forms and different media to help scholars better understand how the surfaces of medieval bodies not only presented social values and norms, but also operated within a designated spatial environment.

This event will be held via Zoom. A link will be circulated to registrants in advance of the event. This event will be live with automatic captions.

Fragment of a Hanging with Nereids, Egypt, 5th-6th c. Tapestry weave, wool and linen. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, DC, Byzantine Collection, BZ.1932.1.

Wood: Natural Affordance and Cultural Values; 31 March–2 April

Wood: Between Natural Affordance and Cultural Values in Eurasia

Mar 31–Apr 2, 2022

Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich / online

More information

Organised by Aleksandra Lipińska (Professor for Art of the Early Modern Period, Institute for Art History, LMU Munich) and Ilse Sturkenboom (Professor for Islamic Art History, Institute for Art History, LMU Munich)

In ‘The Theory of Affordances’ of 1977, the American psychologist James J. Gibson coined the term affordance to denote that which environment offers an animal [or a human for that matter] for good or ill. This concept resonated broadly within humanities and, more recently, especially within material culture studies. Wood can be understood as a natural affordance that is one of the most universally available materials in a vast area of the world. Wood comes with its natural and physical characteristics that determine its workability. The use of various kinds of wood is, however, not only determined by the availability and applicability of the material itself but also by cultural values and specific requirements within a society.

This conference aims at bringing together scholars from diverse fields within humanities and science to discuss similarities and differences, continuities and discontinuities in the notions surrounding wood in various cultural contexts within Eurasia until the “material revolution” that followed after 1900. We would like to address the question of the relationships or tensions between the naturally determined affordances of timber and their cultural coding.

BAA-Tagung "Image and Narrative in Romanesque Art;" 28–30 March

Image and Narrative in Romanesque Art

28 – 30 Mar 2022

British School at Rome

More information

The British Archaeological Association will hold the seventh in its biennial International Romanesque conference series in conjunction with the British School at Rome on 28-30 March, 2022. The theme is Image and Narrative in Romanesque Art, and the aim is to examine the use of imagery in the Latin Church between c.1000 and c.1200. The Conference will take place at the British School, with the opportunity to stay on for two days of visits to Romanesque monuments on 31 March and 1 April.

While illustrated codices, sequential pictorial narratives, apse mosaics, and devotional statues were well established before c.1000, several important new image types and settings came into being over the Romanesque period – figuratively enriched portals, historiated cloisters, moralizing programmes, imagery in glass. The conference will consider imagery in its various manifestations, exploring narrative modes, the significance of spatial positioning and visibility, the uses and physical trappings of devotional images, the relationship between political or reformist agendas and the rhetorical power of imagery, and the extent to which media play a role in the development or importation of new iconographical formulae. Are images invested with singular meanings, or are they intentionally polysemous? Does the interest in architectural ‘articulation’ initiate a new understanding of the expressive and aesthetic potential of imagery, and/or emphasise its didactic purpose? Are viewers provided with guidance as to interpretation – through inscriptions, or compositional and visual triggers? How does material and setting affect imagery? How might we understand image and narrative in the Latin West between c.1000 and c.1200?

Speakers include Kristen Aavitsland, Marcello Angheben, Claude Andrault-Schmitt, Giulia Arcidiacono, Yael Barash, Tancredi Bella, Jessica Berenbeim, Armin Bergmeier, Irene Caracciolo, Manuel Castiñeiras, Gaetano Curzi, Barbara Franzé, Deborah Kahn, Wilfried Keil, Robert Maxwell, John McNeill, Mina Miyamoto, Alison Perchuk, Claudia Quattrocchi, Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, Serena Romano, Carles Sanchez, Béla Zsolt Szakács, Rose Walker, and Andrea Worm.

The 2022 conference will be held in the British School at Rome from 28-30 March, 2022 on the theme Image and Narrative in Romanesque Art. Given continuing restrictions on numbers in Italian lecture theatres, however, numbers are restricted and we will operate a waiting list in the hope that the cap on numbers – currently 60 – will rise to 90.

The Ziyareti of Kykkos: The Kykkotissa Meets the Ottomans Annemarie Weyl Carr, Southern Methodist University (emerita); 8 April at 12:00pm; Register now!

The Ziyareti of Kykkos: The Kykkotissa Meets the Ottomans

Annemarie Weyl Carr, Southern Methodist University (emerita)

Respondent: Robert S. Nelson, Yale University

Zoom lectures begin at 12 noon Eastern Time; registration is required.
Register here

You can register at any time to join a lecture. Your registration is valid for the whole series; attend as many as you like. You will automatically receive reminders for the lectures.

Lecture series organized by Robert S. Nelson, Robert Lehman Professor in the History of Art, and Vasileios Marinis, associate professor of Christian Art and Architecture at the ISM and YDS.

Presented in collaboration with Yale Department of Classics and Yale Department of the History of Art.

Solidus of Emperor Herakleios, Constantinople, 7th century, Yale University Art Gallery

Staging Late Antiquity: An 11th Century Revolution in Ethiopian Architecture; 11 February at 12:00pm; Register now!

Staging Late Antiquity: An 11th Century Revolution in Ethiopian Architecture

Mikael Muehlbauer, American Council of Learned Societies

Respondent: Jacopo Gnisci, University College London

Zoom lectures begin at 12 noon Eastern Time; registration is required.
Register here

You can register at any time to join a lecture. Your registration is valid for the whole series; attend as many as you like. You will automatically receive reminders for the lectures.

Lecture series organized by Robert S. Nelson, Robert Lehman Professor in the History of Art, and Vasileios Marinis, associate professor of Christian Art and Architecture at the ISM and YDS.

Presented in collaboration with Yale Department of Classics and Yale Department of the History of Art.

Solidus of Emperor Herakleios, Constantinople, 7th century, Yale University Art Gallery

“Towards a Higher Vision” and “Inside the Depth of Words”: The Aesthetics of Layering in Byzantine Art and Literature; 11 March at 12:00pm; Register now!

“Towards a Higher Vision” and “Inside the Depth of Words”: The Aesthetics of Layering in Byzantine Art and Literature

Panagiotis Agapitos, University of Cyprus

Respondent: Emmanuel Bourbouhakis, Princeton University

Zoom lectures begin at 12 noon Eastern Time; registration is required.
Register here

You can register at any time to join a lecture. Your registration is valid for the whole series; attend as many as you like. You will automatically receive reminders for the lectures.

Lecture series organized by Robert S. Nelson, Robert Lehman Professor in the History of Art, and Vasileios Marinis, associate professor of Christian Art and Architecture at the ISM and YDS.

Presented in collaboration with Yale Department of Classics and Yale Department of the History of Art.

Solidus of Emperor Herakleios, Constantinople, 7th century, Yale University Art Gallery

Beyond Transfer and Revival: Narrative Creativity in Medieval Italian Mural Decoration (11th–13th c.); College Art Association Annual Conference; Zoom, 3 March; 9:30–10:30am CST

Beyond Transfer and Revival: Narrative Creativity in Medieval Italian Mural Decoration (11th–13th c.)

3 March; 9:30–10:30am CST, Zoom

The 110th College Art Association Annual Conference

More information and registration: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2022/meetingapp.cgi/Home/0

Organizer and Chair: Armin Bergmeier, University of Leipzig

Organizer and Discussant: Alison Locke Perchuk, California State University: Channel Islands

The period 1000–1250 saw vibrant artistic and intellectual creativity in medieval Italian wall paintings and mosaics. Large-format narrative sequences were deployed in new ways to elevate viewers spiritually, perform exegesis, shape communal identity, teach history and theology, and display power. Authors and artists offered sophisticated theorizations of the aesthetic, affective, and communicative capacities of images. While some sequences drew on existing models, notably the paintings and mosaics that accrued to Old St. Peter’s, many more were ad hoc creations, mixing old and new motifs, styles, and artistic strategies to generate distinctive compositions intended for specific spaces, sites, and purposes. The historical and conceptual weight of Rome (then as now) and the natural coherence of pictorial recensions versus the heterogeneity of unaffiliated narrative sequences has resulted in a historiographical privileging of passive transfers and revivals over discrete acts of artistic and patronal creative agency. This panel seeks to reset that balance.

Narrative creativity played out in the development of new iconographies, narrative structures, and framing systems, and in the reimagining and repurposing of old ones. New pictorial strategies were generated for new architectural forms and spatio-liturgical arrangements; Byzantine decorative practices were integrated with Latin architecture and vice versa. Collective analyses generally cluster by iconography, region, or artisans; we seek instead to bring together papers underscoring how creativity manifested itself in discrete monuments, whether well-known, like Santa Maria in Cosmedin or Sant’Angelo in Formis, or deserving of greater fame, like San Tommaso ad Acquanegra sul Chiese or San Calocero in Civate.

After the Book of Kells: Insular Art in Scotland and Ireland, c. 900 to 1900; online, 6 February, 6 March, and 24 April

After the Book of Kells: Insular Art in Scotland and Ireland, c. 900 to 1900

Online, three half-days (Sat Feb 6th, Sat Mar 6th, Sat Apr 24th )

More information

Examinations of Insular art typically focus upon the eighth and early ninth centuries; and yet, the Insular artistic tradition in Scotland and Ireland continued to flourish and develop into the early modern era. The reliquaries, monuments, and manuscripts made in the earlier period had long lives, with additions and transformations occurring across many generations and even into the twenty-first century. This material is less familiar to the general public, possibly due to antiquarian perception of it as a waning and degenerate manifestation of the art of the earlier period. As are composite objects, an assemblage of parts and repairs that span centuries, they have challenged traditional ways of categorizing, conserving and valuing artworks and monuments.

This conference shifts the emphasis to the later phases of Insular art, exploring the continuity and transformations of shared traditions evident from the medieval to modern day.

Organizers: Heather Pulliam, University of Edinburgh and Rachel Moss, Trinity College Dublin.

Shrine of The Gospels of Saint Molaise early 20th century (original dated 1001–25), Metropolitan Museum of Art