IMC 2019: Sessions

The contributions of this session concern with the problem, how meaning can materialize in artworks and abstract terms and how objects critically reflect their assumed status as consistent entities. Literature, heraldic treatises and artworks are scrutinized in consideration of the colour blue in its prestigious value and further potentialities to articulate the virtue of loyalty in the late Middle Ages. Then, a chasuble with a late medieval cross and the Great Cameo of France, presumably from the first century BCE or the first century CE, will be examined in their particular historical and manufacturing context and related to broader art historical perspectives: paraments with figurative embroidery and the fabrication of cameos as wearable preciosities and as items of archaeological interest. Considering the relationship between the mariological program and the chasuble`s liturgical function as a critical moment as well as examining the cameo`s political iconography in regard of its material structre, the objects` semantic relevance unfolds in being relieved from the prominence of viewable and constant surfaces.