Architectural Representation and Medieval Art, session at 108th College Art Association Annual Conference, Chicago, February 12–15, 2020

Images of architecture are ubiquitous in the art of the Middle Ages, and the consistent centrality of such imagery throughout this thousand-year time span raises a wide variety of questions. Medieval architectural representations may be emblematic, represent only an architectural fragment, be fanciful in form, or show structures from multiple viewpoints; they are often in disparate scale with relation to other figures. As isolated images, they are discussed in terms of formal types and stylistic categories and mined for information about actual structures, yet these representations are most remarkable for the ways in which they participate in and contribute to the systems of signification of which they are a part. They invite – and even insist on – open-ended and overlapping interpretations and associations, communicating purposely diffuse meanings in an age that well understood the value of evocative visual worlds. This session welcomes papers on any aspect of or approach to architectural representation in medieval art – whether, for example, questions of production, dissemination, use, and reception or issues of composition, style, and subject matter – in order to explore the myriad ways in which buildings are implicated in the broader field of the production of meaning for this millennium characterized by movement and change played out in a space stretching from Scandinavia into the Middle East.

Session Sponsor
International Center of Medieval Art

Session Organzier
Jenny H. Shaffer, New York University School of Professional Studies