IMC 2025: Sessions

From its origins, Medieval art has been didactic in nature. Iconography was designed to provide learning across all layers of society. The Body provided the medieval viewer a metaphor through which many aspects of life, theology and history could be taught. Expression of corporeality was avoided in the earliest images of Christ, whereas late medieval artists used explicit depictions of Christ’s crucified body as a tool in explaining the history of salvation. Metaphoric bodies such as the early Christian symbol of the Cross, the Church or the Eucharist commonly construct their meaning through definitions related to the human body. On the other hand, images of bodies provided viewers with contexts of bodily functions they were confronted with in everyday life; think of the act of bleeding or lactation but also common activities such as sleeping. Deformed bodies taught about the outsiders in society and religion, such as the Jews and Saracens but deformed bodies also taught about zealotry and martyrdom. Dressed bodies taught about economic or relgigious status, but also of historicity and exclusion, think of the Jewish yellow badge. In short: throughout the Middle Ages the body functioned as a didactic tool in an enormously varied manner. The aim of these sessions is to shed light on this immense variety of uses of the body in Medieval art.

The vast concept of the Body in Medieval Art has provided our research group of the University of Amsterdam a fruitful theme for iconographical research in Medieval Art. In 2020 this culminated in the organization of the exhibition Body Language. The Body in Medieval Art held at museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht and participation at the congress Body under Threat held at the University of Gdansk in 2022. A new exhibition within this theme is also planned for the near future.

Ever since the Body Language exhibition, new research and researchers have been added to the group. Both established art historians as well as PhD and Masters students present their original research on the Body in Medieval Art.