Material Processes and Making in Medieval Art and Architecture, Session at 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 12–15, 2016
Art historians traditionally focus on the finished work, yet attention to the creative process of making allows us to consider how medieval builders and artisans constructed monuments, made objects, and planned workflow for large-scale projects. Furthermore, this line of inquiry allows us to consider spatial planning and haptic encounters. The use of new technologies such as digital reconstructions, laser scans, 3D printing, and other imaging tools provides scholars with the opportunity to understand the conceptual processes of art making in the Middle Ages as never before through reverse engineering.
Recent art-historical scholarship has reintroduced interest in the materiality/object-ness of medieval art and architecture and attendant somatic responses. Analysis of the processes of making is fundamental to this renewed interest in the relationship between materiality and human experience of the art object. Together, these inquiries will yield new insights into the social, economic, political, and practical conditions of production.
For this session we are interested in presentations that investigate the process of making medieval art and architecture and what these processes tell us about medieval artistic production. We welcome papers that explore questions such as:
- What can art historians learn from studying creative processes?
- What are the methods of design to finished product?
- How did masons and artisans revise work in progress or finished work?
- Why are some materials selected over others?
Organizers
Meredith Cohen, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Art History, UCLA
Kristine Tanton, Ph.D., Affiliate, CMRS/UCLA