To write about works that cannot be sensually perceived involves considerable strain. Absent the object, art historians must stretch their methods to, or even past, the breaking point. This concise volume addresses the problems inherent in studying medieval works of art, artifacts, and monuments that have disappeared, have been destroyed, or perhaps never existed in the first place.
The contributors to this volume are confronted with the full expanse of what they cannot see, handle, or know. Connecting object histories, the anthropology of images, and historiography, they seek to understand how people have made sense of the past by examining objects, images, and architectural and urban spaces. Intersecting these approaches is a deep current of reflection upon the theorization of historical analysis and the ways in which the past is inscribed into layers of evidence that are only ever revealed in the historian's present tense.
Highly original and theoretically sophisticated, this volume will stimulate debate among art historians about the critical practices used to confront the formative presence of destruction, loss, obscurity, and existential uncertainty within the history of art and the study of historical material and visual cultures.
In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Michele Bacci, Claudia Brittenham, Sonja Drimmer, Jaś Elsner, Peter Geimer, Danielle B. Joyner, Kristopher W. Kersey, Lena Liepe, Meekyung MacMurdie, and Michelle McCoy.
About the Author: Beate Fricke is Professor of History of Art at the University of Bern. She is the author of Fallen Idols, Risen Saints: Saint Foy of Conques and the Revival of Monumental Sculpture in Medieval Art and coeditor of The Public in the Picture: Involving the Beholder in Antique, Islamic, Byzantine, and Western Medieval and Renaissance Art.
Aden Kumler is Professor of Art History at the University of Basel. She is the author of Translating Truth: Ambitious Images and Religious Knowledge in Late Medieval France and England.
