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IMC 2016: Sessions

Session 1315: The Long Lives of Medieval Art and Architecture, II: Buildings and Their Fragments

Wednesday 6 July 2016, 16.30-18.00

Sponsor:Association Villard de Honnecourt for the Interdisciplinary Study of Technology, Science & Art (AVISTA)
Organiser:Amanda W. Dotseth, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London / Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Madrid
Moderator/Chair:Amanda W. Dotseth, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London / Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Madrid
Paper 1315-aRecycling Santa Tecla: The Demolition and Afterlife of an Early Christian Basilica
(Language: English)
Charles Morscheck, Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, Drexel University, Pennsylvania
Index terms: Architecture - Religious, Technology
Paper 1315-bThe 'Afterlives' of the Tomb of Bishop Bingham at Salisbury
(Language: English)
Catherine Walden, Independent Scholar, Virginia
Index terms: Architecture - Religious, Art History - Sculpture, Medievalism and Antiquarianism
Paper 1315-cThe Portal from Coulangé: A Peripatetic Journey
(Language: English)
Nancy Wu, The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Index terms: Architecture - Religious, Medievalism and Antiquarianism
Abstract

The way in which we access and analyze medieval buildings and the objects contained therein is deeply inflected by meaningful events in their long lives. Over time, the circumstances of creation and function, location, movement, modification and restoration, and styles of valorization leave indelible, if not always visible, marks. To all this, we might add yet another layer of circumstances influential to current interpretation: that deposited by the creative act of writing and rewriting the history of art and architecture. Historians, too, make their marks. We might, therefore, consider the telling of a building's or object's life as moving beyond biography to hagiography, in which over time material things are activated and set apart by their gesta. Pivoting from histories that privilege a presumed original state, this pair of sessions, dedicated to buildings and to objects respectively, presents papers on the long lives of medieval art that highlight the utility of diachronic analysis and defy the chronological or geographic boundaries set by academic discipline.