Sonorous and Brilliant Emptiness: Visual Approaches to White, Empty, and Silent in Medieval Art
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Art-Hist - Researches on History and Theory of Artistic Creation from Antiquity to Modern Times
Organizer Name
Vincent Debiais
Organizer Affiliation
Centre d'études supérieures de civilisation médiévale
Presider Name
Meredith Raucher
Presider Affiliation
Johns Hopkins Univ.
Paper Title 1
Talking Empty Scroll: Zechariah's Images in the _Rationale divinorum officiorum_
Presenter 1 Name
Pamela Nourrigeon
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Centre d'études supérieures de civilisation médiévale
Paper Title 2
The Iconography, Semiotics, and Phenomenology of the Bare Church Wall
Presenter 2 Name
Doron Bauer
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Florida State Univ.
Paper Title 3
Bare Skin: Blank Parchment as Conveyer of Meaning in Medieval Manuscripts
Presenter 3 Name
Lynley Anne Herbert
Presenter 3 Affiliation
Walters Art Museum
Paper Title 4
Brilliant Blankness: Polychromy in the Ulrichskapelle in Müstair
Presenter 4 Name
Rachel Danford
Presenter 4 Affiliation
Johns Hopkins Univ.
Start Date
8-5-2014 7:30 PM
Session Location
Schneider 1355
Description
The platform ART-HIST is designed as a structure of "virtual symposium" in which an original paper is proposed as support of discussions and exchanges between the members of a community of researchers invited to exchange on artistic creation from Antiquity to Modern times. A moderator assures the flow of exchanges between the participants to the virtual symposium, leads the debate and writes the synthesis of discussions. As a conclusion, the diptych article-synthesis is published on-line and becomes accessible to Internet users.
New questions regarding the ability of inscribed, engraved, sculpted or painted signs to depict absence or emptiness. This topic can be explored in even the more anachronistic connotations through three terms: whiteness, emptiness, and silence. This broad theme of research encompasses both the intellectual conception of blankness and its use in the material and artistic culture.
By ascribing blankness a real value, this session do not intend to understand the terms “whiteness, emptiness, and silence” within the strict sense of their opposition (black, fullness, and the voice), as if blankness were simply a null presence, whether auditory, visual, or gestural. Instead, it returns the material status to blankness that the concept held in the Middle Ages when it was understood as a substance with numerous tangible qualities and a complex, symbolic background.
Blankness, as it is envisioned here, is above all a malleable material, invoked in order to represent things that are unrepresentable by the traditional semiotic methods of artistic creation, of literary and theological exegesis, or of material culture. The topic proposed by the Art-Hist collective will endeavor to find traces of the use and the characterization of this elusive material.
Vincent Debiais
Sonorous and Brilliant Emptiness: Visual Approaches to White, Empty, and Silent in Medieval Art
Schneider 1355
The platform ART-HIST is designed as a structure of "virtual symposium" in which an original paper is proposed as support of discussions and exchanges between the members of a community of researchers invited to exchange on artistic creation from Antiquity to Modern times. A moderator assures the flow of exchanges between the participants to the virtual symposium, leads the debate and writes the synthesis of discussions. As a conclusion, the diptych article-synthesis is published on-line and becomes accessible to Internet users.
New questions regarding the ability of inscribed, engraved, sculpted or painted signs to depict absence or emptiness. This topic can be explored in even the more anachronistic connotations through three terms: whiteness, emptiness, and silence. This broad theme of research encompasses both the intellectual conception of blankness and its use in the material and artistic culture.
By ascribing blankness a real value, this session do not intend to understand the terms “whiteness, emptiness, and silence” within the strict sense of their opposition (black, fullness, and the voice), as if blankness were simply a null presence, whether auditory, visual, or gestural. Instead, it returns the material status to blankness that the concept held in the Middle Ages when it was understood as a substance with numerous tangible qualities and a complex, symbolic background.
Blankness, as it is envisioned here, is above all a malleable material, invoked in order to represent things that are unrepresentable by the traditional semiotic methods of artistic creation, of literary and theological exegesis, or of material culture. The topic proposed by the Art-Hist collective will endeavor to find traces of the use and the characterization of this elusive material.
Vincent Debiais