Seminar: The Matter of Medieval Art: Materials, Materiality, & Meaning

The Matter of Medieval Art: Materials, Materiality, and Meaning

Medieval art presents its modern interpreters with a conundrum. Patrons, artists, and audiences in medieval Europe were distinctly alert to the semantic import of physical matter, ascribing both earthly and metaphysical properties to materials. In addition, many were intimately familiar with the sensible properties (and possibilities) presented by particular artistic media. By contrast, most modern students of medieval art in the United States encounter much of it exclusively through the medium of photographic representation, or in installations that prevent them from handling their objects of study (as in museums). We are alienated from the phenomenological contexts of our objects of study.

This seminar will consider the embodied experience and historical contingency of artifacts and monuments crafted in the Middle Ages by medieval contemporaries and modern scholars. We will examine them through dual “materialist” lenses: crafting what Karen Overbey has called accounts of medieval matter devised by modern interpreters, and considering what Caroline Walker Bynum has called the medieval conception of matter, one engaged with the conditions that make the medieval artistic and ritual experience of objects possible. In the process, we will study how major categories of medieval artworks are made, what they are made of, and how those factors condition past and present interpretations. Some weeks, we will focus on media (e.g. icons, fresco, metalwork, portable and architectural sculpture). Other weeks will center on the origins and application of materials (e.g. crystal, gold, ivory, wood, vermilion, marble).