IMC 2024: Sessions
Session 1545: Human Nature: Naturalism and Medieval Crises of Pictorial Representation, I
Thursday 4 July 2024, 09:00-10:30
| Organiser: | Carly Boxer, Department of Art & Art History, Bucknell University, Pennsylvania |
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| Moderator/Chair: | Jess Bailey, Department of History of Art, University College London |
| Paper 1545-a | The Predator's Gaze and the Naturalism of Byzantine Art (Language: English) Index terms: Art History - General, Byzantine Studies and Language and Literature - Greek |
| Paper 1545-b | Learning to Look: Challenging Images of Christ, c. 1000 (Language: English) Index terms: Art History - General, Art History - Sculpture and Liturgy |
| Abstract | Replicating nature was an ambitious and vexing task in the Middle Ages. Medieval artists took varied approaches to picturing the natural world in the images they made: copying, competing with, or pushing against assumptions about the appearance of life around them. This is especially true of art that thematized the human body or the natural world. Images that problematized the look of human subjects, the body, flora, and fauna betray ongoing crises in medieval aesthetics: anxieties, debates, and confrontations about images’ relation to the things they represented played out over centuries across the medieval world. This session interrogates medieval ideas about how the natural world ought to be depicted, ideas that were often articulated and theorized in the images themselves. The papers in this session will examine moments of tension and upheaval in representational practices, examining how attitudes toward the human and toward nature manifested in visual and material culture. |