Elina Gertsman

This volume celebrates the storied career of Stephen N. Fliegel, the former Robert Bergman Curator of Medieval Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). Focusing on holdings in some of the most important medieval collections in North America and Europe, authors offer perspectives on curatorial practices with special foci on Burgundian art, acquisition histories, and objects in the CMA.

Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of late medieval material culture. In The Absent Image, I argue that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures. Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, I consider the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death.

Abstraction haunts medieval art, both withdrawing figuration and suggesting elusive presence. How does it make or destroy meaning in the process? Does it suggest the failure of figuration, the faltering of iconography? Does medieval abstraction function because it is imperfect, incomplete, and uncorrected—and therefore cognitively, visually demanding? Is it, conversely, precisely about perfection? To what extent is the abstract predicated on theorization of the unrepresentable and imperceptible? Does medieval abstraction pit aesthetics against metaphysics, or does it enrich it, or frame it, or both? Essays in this collection explore these and other questions that coalesce around three broad themes: medieval abstraction as the untethering of image from what it purports to represent, abstraction as a vehicle for signification, and abstraction as a form of figuration. Contributors approach the concept of medieval abstraction from a multitude of perspectives—formal, semiotic, iconographic, material, phenomenological, epistemological.

Rare and enigmatic, the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Table Fountain has survived nearly intact for 700 years. A medieval automaton, the fountain is an exquisite piece of Gothic architecture in miniature, complete with translucent and opaque enamel plaques, along with nozzles in the shapes of lions and dragons. It is kinetic as well: water wheels and bells capture the sight and sound of flowing water. Other such fountains are mentioned in royal inventories, but they were probably melted down for other uses.

Acquired by the museum in 1924, this object inspires many questions about its origins and history. Myth and Mystique: Cleveland’s Gothic Table Fountain addresses these lingering questions, and assesses the fountain in the context of a group of objects including luxury silver, hand-washing vessels, enamels, illuminated manuscripts, and a painting, each of which informs some aspect of its history, functionality, presumed use, materials, technique, dating, and style. The catalogue is published in conjunction with an eponymous exhibition, co-organized by Elina Gertsman and Stephen N. Fliegel at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

This book focuses on the Shrine Madonnas, or Vierges ouvrantes, sculptures which conceal within their bodies complex carved and/or painted iconographies. The Shrine Madonna emerged in Europe at the end of the 1200s, and reached a peak of popularity during the following three centuries. I argue that the appearance of these objects—predicated as they are on the dynamic of concealment, revelation, and fragmentation—points to the changing roles of vision and sensation in the complex performative ways the audiences were expected to engage with devotional art, both in public and in private. The book, which offers the first sustained analysis of these fascinating sculptures, considers them in terms of the rhetoric of secrecy, the discourse of containment, and the tropes of unveiling, and within the context of the increasingly important roles of sight and touch in late medieval devotional art. Aside from the objects themselves, the author considers evidence from play texts, travel logs, convent chronicles, descriptions of ceremonial feast day liturgies, automata diagrams and descriptions, visionary accounts, philosophical debates on the Eucharist, devotional handbooks, and treatises on optics, the senses, anatomy, childbirth, and memory. Specifically, I explore how the statues were associated with the processes of seeing and memory-making, and how they functioned as instruments of revelatory knowledge and spiritual reformation in the context of late medieval European culture and devotional art.

Recipient of the Millard Meiss Publication Grant and the Samuel H. Kress Research Award from the International Center of Medieval Art.

Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural
Volume 4, Number 1, 2015

Special Issue: Animating Medieval Art
Guest Edited by Elina Gertsman

This gathering of essays inquires into the agentic potential of later
medieval devotional objects. As a group, the articles interrogate
animate and animated objects whose enlivening stands at the
intersection of visual, literary, and performative cultures. Although
interdisciplinary in nature, all essays retain a focus on viewing
practices, on the interaction between the object and the beholder: as
such, they stand at the crux of current scholarly interest in
materiality and agency inherent in, and attributed to medieval images.
The material focuses on the later Middle Ages but spans a wide range of
geographical locations, from Spain to Poland.

Table of Contents:

Elina Gertsman, "Introduction: 'Bewilderment Overwhelms Me'”

Sarah Salih, "Idol Theory"

Gerhard Lutz, "The Drop of Blood: Image and Piety in the Twelfth and
Thirteenth Centuries"

Christopher Swift, "Robot Saints"

Kamil Kopania, "Animating Christ in Late Medieval and Early Modern
Poland"

Asa Simon Mittman, Response: "Of Wood and Bone: Crafting Living Things"

Collected essays that consider the role of weeping in medieval Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures, and explore it in relation to viewership, gender, piety, emotion, sensory experience, transmission, and social, visual, and linguistic performances.

This book introduces readers to the imagery and texts of the Dance of Death, an extraordinary subject that first emerged in western European art and literature in the late medieval era. Conceived from the start as an inherently public image, simultaneously intensely personal and widely accessible, the medieval Dance of Death proclaimed the inevitability of death and declared the futility of human ambition. Gertsman inquires into the theological, socio-historic, literary, and artistic contexts of the Dance of Death, exploring it as a site of interaction between text, image, and beholder. Pulling together a wide variety of sources and drawing attention to those images that have slipped through the cracks of the art historical canon, the book examines the visual, textual, aural, pastoral, and performative discourses that informed the creation and reception of the Dance of Death, and proposes different modes of viewing for several paintings, each of which invited the beholder to participate in an active, kinesthetic experience.　　

Winner of the John Nicholas Brown Award from the Medieval Academy of America

Recipient of the Medieval Academy of America subvention and the Samuel H. Kress Research Award from the International Center for Medieval Art.

The most remarkable feature of the Hammelburg
Mahzor, a fourteenth-century
German High Holiday
book, is the inclusion of zoocephalic figures: humans
with beastly heads. The purpose of this essay is to explore
the semiotics and phenomenology of this specifically
Jewish visual idiom, and to suggest that its presence lies
at the intersection of language, philosophy, poetry, and
history. In the Mahzor, zoocephaly signals distinction
that collapses temporalities, tests the limits of alterity, and
engages in a sophisticated word–image
play that strives
to establish visceral connections with the community of
the manuscript’s users. Hammelburg zoocephali invoke
the fragility of the human condition by establishing
reverberating relationships between themselves and other
inhabitants of the Mahzor’s pages: echoes of many, avatars
of none. Outwardly monstrous yet emphatically human,
these zoocephali prove to be particularly excellent images
to think with about the place of Hebrew manuscripts in
the long history of medieval visual culture.

The Ambrosian Tanakh, one of the earliest Ashkenazic books to include zoocephalic protagonists, closes with an extraordinary pair of scenes: Ezekiel’s Vision of the Chariot painted across the gutter from the Feast of the Righteous—an eschatological event discussed in a series of rabbinical texts and later medieval commentaries. In this article, I consider the Ambrosian beastly banquet as a nucleus of images and ideas that coalesce around the visually and ontologically exceptional zoocephalic idiom particular to late medieval Jewish manuscripts. After considering the book’s material and figurative emphasis on animality as a whole, I explore visual conversations its images establish with each other and with other contemporaneous Hebrew manuscripts in order to suggest the way that they—along with Talmudic and midrashic exegetical literature—inflect the meaning and perception of the feasting scene. Finally, I consider animal-human hybrids within a larger set of Jewish cultural discourses on the monstrous and the marvelous. At stake is the very system of signification that binds the visual and the discursive in a vivid, intellectually demanding mode of reception characteristic of medieval Ashkenazic books, here distilled and foregrounded through the trope of animality.

This essay explores a late medieval osculatory medallion in terms of abstraction, here considered in the medieval definition of the term: as withdrawal, both corporeal and intellectual. Carved from nacre and originally meant to be enclosed with a wax agnus dei, the osculatory embodies abstraction into a figurative, strikingly material object, only to withdraw that figuration and that materiality repeatedly. In and of itself, nacre constitutes a vestige of remotionmaternal matter from which the pearl was abstracted, made into a surface from which the image was abstracted through osculation. The medallion, moreover, spins phantasms around Christ's flesh: the wafer echoed in the agnus dei, the agnus dei echoed in the nacre plaque, and the image that claimed to represent the divine body in the wafer. To pry apart layers of such mimetic phantasms was to abstract: nacre from wax, wax from wheat, image from prototype.

It can be said that medieval art, in great part, is predicated on the engagement with the cult of the saints. Between the 5th and 16th centuries, saints and their images grounded Christian belief and shaped its practices. Patron saints formed a crucial part of the devotee’s spiritual life, believed to provide intercession, work miracles, and model pious behavior. Countless churches and shrines were dedicated to well-known as well as local saints, their visual programs coalescing around reliquaries that held the bodily remains or contact relics of holy men and women. The faithful undertook pilgrimages to holy shrines in order to secure saints’ help and to petition them with prayer. Saints’ likenesses were fashioned in wood and metal, paint and stone, ivory and textile; their lives were narrated and visualized in scores of manuscripts. In other words, to explore a history of medieval art and the cult of saints one would have to write a history of medieval art as a whole. The following bibliography provides but a sample of key studies that address specific topics with a focus on Western medieval and Byzantine art: images of saints in churches and monasteries; art along pilgrimage roads; relics and reliquaries; and saints and piety. It does not include sources that treat sacred spaces dedicated to saints—churches, shrines, chapels—as a whole.

On June 16th, scholars from France and the USA will (virtually) gather to present some case studies on the notion of abstraction in medieval visual culture. Conceived as a workshop, with short presentations and time to discuss, this event will conclude the program sponsored by the FACE Foundation between 2018 and 2021.

On May 18, 2019, the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University will host “Abstraction Before the Age of Abstract Art,” a symposium co-sponsored with the Kress Foundation, the French American Cultural Foundation, Case Western Reserve University, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Focusing on the long and rich tradition of nonfigurative art, which remains virtually unacknowledged by our field, the symposium will explore the inception and transformation of abstraction(s) at various historical pivot points between the advent of Christianity and the interrogation of epistemological queries in the later Middle Ages.

Rooted in the questioning of primacy of figuration, the symposium aims to introduce the concept of abstraction to the field of pre-modern art and redefine it as a visual structure that predicates the very nature of image-making. With “Abstraction Before the Age of Abstract Art,” we seek to interrogate non-figurative forms in medieval material culture; to contextualize these forms within the contemporaneous cultural, philosophical, and epistemological discourses; to identify the common features that favor the emergence of abstraction specifically in the long Middle Ages; and to determine how abstraction has been used to make visible what is beyond any kind of representation.

A full schedule and free registration form will be available after April 7 at https://ima.princeton.edu/conferences.

Details available now at https://preabstract.hypotheses.org/343

Programme de recherche en histoire de l'art entre Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland (USA) et l'École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris (France), financé par la FACE Foundation / A joint research program in Art History between Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland (USA) and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris (France), sponsored by the FACE Foundation

Graduate students and early career scholars are invited to send in paper abstracts for a two-day symposium on animality in pre-modern, and particularly medieval, Jewish art and culture. The symposium, which will take place at the Newberry Library in Chicago on May 14-15, 2024, will address a plethora of topics: cosmic ecologies and their continuities across the animalhuman-divine-demonic spectrum; visual and textual collisions between humanities and animalities; bestialization as a heuristic; animalization of Jews in Jewish and Christian discourses; zoocephaly in material and literary sources; monstrosities and hybridities as sites of wonder and liminality. We have already assembled a cohort of established scholars in the fields of Art History and Judaic Studies to speak at the symposium, and our hope is to include some new voices as well.

CAA NEWS TODAY
CAA 2022 AWARDS FOR DISTINCTION
posted by CAA — Jan 24, 2022

CAA announces the 2022 recipients of Awards for Distinction. By honoring outstanding member achievements, CAA reaffirms its mission to encourage the highest standards of scholarship, practice, connoisseurship, and teaching in the arts. With these annual awards, CAA seeks to honor individual artists, art historians, authors, museum professionals, and critics whose accomplishments transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.

Charles Rufus Morey Book Award 

Elina Gertsman, The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books, Penn State University Press, 2021.

Countering the customary interpretation of late medieval art as relentlessly profuse and exuberant, Elina Gertsman’s The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books, explores different constructions of emptiness ranging from the presentation of voids in illustrations to represent the unrepresentable to the deliberate inclusion of physical holes in manuscript pages designed to reveal portions of other pages. Gertsman’s investigation of the “fecundity of emptiness” is a generative and compelling topic for scholars of art history/visual studies across areas, both within and outside Medieval Studies. She argues and demonstrates that, between 1200s and 1500s, the broad circulation of scientific thought and its engagement with theology and formal and literary discourses on emptiness, absence, and negation account for visual, cognitive, and material expressions on the pages of medieval books. Cross-disciplinary in its approach, Gertsman’s book simultaneously draws attention to the visual and material aspects of the manuscripts, phenomenological experience, and philosophical, religious, and scientific theories of the period. In doing so she uncovers an unexpected kinship between the medieval artists and the modernist avant-garde, where the void is regarded as the locus of the sublime and of boundless possibility. Her erudite writing and compelling approach to the subject poses questions throughout that magnify the relevance of her study and stimulate personal inquiry—as a reader reflects on other areas of consideration across time called out in the text. The book is lavishly illustrated and artfully designed with a shape and size complementary to the subject of study. 

This session will explore the multivalent relationships between objects, smells, and memory, especially as they existed in the later Middle Ages. We seek to explore two distinct aspects of this relationship. On the one hand, we welcome papers that focus on visual representations of smell, as found in a broad range of manuscripts and printed texts, from medical treatises to romance literature, from tracts on philosophy to encyclopedias. On the other hand, we hope to see contributions that focus on objects whose function is predicated on the sense of smell: among them censers and thuribles used during Christian liturgical services; Jewish Havdalah spice (besamim) containers, used in a ceremony that concluded the Sabbath; incense burners used at receptions, events, and in places of worship throughout Islamic world. Papers may focus on specific case studies or else broadly thematize the intertwinement of smell, memory, and image within the vast sensory landscape of the Middle Ages.