Crafting Presence

Material Evocations, 300-1300
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-90-04-70639-2
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 8, 416 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm

Reihe: Studies in Art & Materiality

The contributions to this volume analyse material and visual effects that are artistically produced in different, often seemingly 'poorer' media. As an alternative to the notions of mimesis and imitation, this volume uses the term 'evocation’, a concept that avoids the interpretation of lifelike mimesis as representational goal and instead values specific and intrinsic dynamisms that afford objects and materials to assume aesthetic presence. The individual chapters show how distinct cross-media perspectives, such as media permeability, semantic openness, and aesthetic blurring, are consciously employed as media-specific strengths that can transcend the boundaries between materials, crafts, and genres, thus allowing medieval makers to create a unique aesthetic of presence.

The texts collected here are the result of a series of on-site workshops and have benefited from the intensive dialogue between art historians, curators, conservators, and restorers in the context of the Research Network Presence and Evocation. Fictitious Materials and Techniques in the Early and High Middle Ages which ran between 2017 and 2020 and was financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dümpelmann, Britta

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Figures

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements

Visual structure of the book

1 Crafting presence: Material evocations 300–1300; Or, the potentials of aesthetic blurring, medial permeability, and semantic openness in medieval works of art

Britta Dümpelmann

2 Memory, renewal, authority: The evangelist ‘symphony’ of the Rossano Gospels

Wolf-Dietrich Löhr

3 Like a fish in water: Materiality and liveliness in a serpentine dish from the church treasury of Saint-Denis

Kristin Böse

4 Raganaldus and the rhetorics of medium

Beatrice Kitzinger

5 ‘Ludus’ and ‘iocus’: Play and joking as a category of medial uncertainty in sixth-century
source texts

Wolf-Dietrich Löhr

6 Godesscalc’s Colophon

Beatrice Kitzinger

7 Similitudo, material evocations, and material effects in the Precious Gospels of Bernward of Hildesheim

Doris Oltrogge

8 Parchment – purple – silk: Evocations of materials in the Theophanu Charter

Bruno Reudenbach

9 The painting techniques used on the Theophanu Charter

Doris Oltrogge and Robert Fuchs

10 Gold, silk, and pearls: The materials and techniques of gold embroidered robes

Tanja Kohwagner-Nikolai

11 Tiles, stucco, and wonder in medieval Anatolia

Patricia Blessing

12 Glass: The art of men and fire

Henrike Haug

13 Deceiving and being deceived: William of Tyre on a “very green glass vessel”

Rebecca Müller

14 Neither true nor false: Materials and meanings of medieval glass gems

Rebecca Müller

15 Tree sap, gemstone, electrum? On terminology, multisensorial perception, and the use of amber in the Early and High Middle Ages

Joanna Olchawa

16 The Ringelheim Crucifix. Polychromed wooden sculpture as a medium for depicting the incarnate deity

Gerhard Lutz

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Britta Dümpelmann, Dr. phil. (2013), has been a research assistant at Freie Universität Berlin since 2014. She has published on media transfer, material mimesis and fictitiousness in early modern sculpture and graphic arts. She led the DFG network from which this volume emerged and is currently working on her second monograph.