IMC 2019: Sessions

This panel focuses on how art historians have appropriated, adapted, and retooled the methods of archeology and anthropology to probe at medieval materialities. Learning from experimental, data-based, and technology-assisted approaches to material culture, as well as from the theoretical approaches of such anthropologists as Alfred Gell, Marilyn Strathern, and Tim Ingold, and of archeologists like Christopher Tilley, medieval art history has become increasingly sensitive to the nuances of matter. This panel will showcase new scholarship that probes the origins and processing of raw materials and the artist-material interaction, and also the materiality of landforms and the built environment, and proceeds from there into the realm of reception. As technical art history has advanced the understanding of what artifacts are made of and how they persist or degrade through time, archeologically and anthropologically informed approaches to them have allowed art historians to better situate 'works of art' within much larger networks of the production of meaning. This development has allowed for the unification of what were once perceived as distant modes of interpretation, such as aesthetics and statistical analysis, or iconology and art conservation.