Full Description
The contributions to this volume analyse material and visual effects that are artistically produced in different, often seemingly 'poorer' media. As an alternative to the notions of mimesis and imitation, this volume uses the term 'evocation', a concept that avoids the interpretation of lifelike mimesis as representational goal and instead values specific and intrinsic dynamisms that afford objects and materials to assume aesthetic presence. The individual chapters show how distinct cross-media perspectives, such as media permeability, semantic openness, and aesthetic blurring, are consciously employed as media-specific strengths that can transcend the boundaries between materials, crafts, and genres, thus allowing medieval makers to create a unique aesthetic of presence.
The texts collected here are the result of a series of on-site workshops and have benefited from the intensive dialogue between art historians, curators, conservators, and restorers in the context of the Research Network Presence and Evocation. Fictitious Materials and Techniques in the Early and High Middle Ages which ran between 2017 and 2020 and was financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft - project number 338069669
Contents
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Visual structure of the book
1 Crafting presence: Material evocations 300-1300; Or, the potentials of aesthetic blurring, medial permeability, and semantic openness in medieval works of art
Britta Dümpelmann
2 Memory, renewal, authority: The evangelist 'symphony' of the Rossano Gospels
Wolf-Dietrich Löhr
3 Like a fish in water: Materiality and liveliness in a serpentine dish from the church treasury of Saint-Denis
Kristin Böse
4 Raganaldus and the rhetorics of medium
Beatrice Kitzinger
5 'Ludus' and 'iocus': Play and joking as a category of medial uncertainty in sixth-century
source texts
Wolf-Dietrich Löhr
6 Godesscalc's Colophon
Beatrice Kitzinger
7 Similitudo, material evocations, and material effects in the Precious Gospels of Bernward of Hildesheim
Doris Oltrogge
8 Parchment - purple - silk: Evocations of materials in the Theophanu Charter
Bruno Reudenbach
9 The painting techniques used on the Theophanu Charter
Doris Oltrogge and Robert Fuchs
10 Gold, silk, and pearls: The materials and techniques of gold embroidered robes
Tanja Kohwagner-Nikolai
11 Tiles, stucco, and wonder in medieval Anatolia
Patricia Blessing
12 Glass: The art of men and fire
Henrike Haug
13 Deceiving and being deceived: William of Tyre on a "very green glass vessel"
Rebecca Müller
14 Neither true nor false: Materials and meanings of medieval glass gems
Rebecca Müller
15 Tree sap, gemstone, electrum? On terminology, multisensorial perception, and the use of amber in the Early and High Middle Ages
Joanna Olchawa
16 The Ringelheim Crucifix. Polychromed wooden sculpture as a medium for depicting the incarnate deity
Gerhard Lutz
Index
