Sabina Rosenbergova

The articles published in this volume aim to contribute to the art historical debates on the role of visual culture within medieval rituals and how the latter were experienced bodily. The studies focus on the essential importance of movement within medieval religious practice and its impact on production, conception, perception, and use of artistic objects and architecture in the Middle Ages. At their core is the moving body, individual or collective, which enters into dialogue with the surrounding architectural or urban space, artefacts, and images, thus awakening their sacred potential with each and every step. Shifting attention to the movement of the worshipers and the objects themselves, this book wishes to instigate further discussion on various medieval visual cultures.

Is it possible to reconstruct the feeling of a medieval pilgrim walking towards the sacred? No, it is not. And yet, the experimental project Migrating Art Historians sought to delve into this impossibility. Journeying by foot over more than 1500km, twelve modern pilgrims – students and scholars from Masaryk University – reached some of the most impressive artistic monuments of medieval France.
One year later, this book presents their intellectual, human, and art historical theoretical know-how, transformed by the experience of their bodies. In this context, exhausted and activated bodies became instruments asking new questions to medieval artworks and sources. Structured as a walk along pilgrimage routes, this book presents firstly the landscape, followed by liminal zones, before leading the reader inside medieval churches and ultimately towards the sacred. Original scientific art historical research combines with personal engagement. What emerges is the subject confronted with the experience of medieval art.

Anton Pilgram has been well-known by art historians for several generations. Within art historical narratives, he is often portrayed as one of the prototypical figures of an architect-builder and sculptor at the threshold between the Middle Ages and the early Modern period. The scope of this article is to use the figure of Pilgram as a case study to examine the historiographical tendencies within, and between, German-speaking and Czech-speaking scholarship.

For more than one thousand years, Mont Saint-Michel has been a magnetic place: pilgrims and tourists travel for days in order to reach this place. The meaning of this tidal island has changed many times – from a holy place, to a sacred space, then becoming a monument of French national identity, and finally a Mecca of consumerist tourism. How can we understand this exceptional ‘longue durée’ success? One could think of it as a place of memory re-appropriated by each generation – but is that su cient? Thanks to written records through the centuries, it is possible to confirm that the fascination with this place has always involved a combination of nature and culture. This harmonic interaction has always been the result of a true artistic conception of the place updated through the centuries. In this sense, our answer is unequivocal: Mont Saint-Michel is an art object that comprises natural, monumental, and performative elements within itself.

The project Migrating Art Historians has risen from the students and teachers’ experiences at the Department of Art History, Masaryk University, that they have been gathering on French medieval pilgrimage paths for the past five years. What they came to realize is that observing artwork while traveling on foot considerably changes the ability to understand it and makes one study the artwork as an actual event. Of course, behind the process of image creation, there is primarily the intention of a patron and the ability of the artisans. However, it is the pilgrim who – in a particular moment and at a particular place – apprehends and thus possesses the image. Because of this immediate personal contact, the immobile images gain the capacity to enlarge their own visual impact and to retroactively grasp a part of the movement dynamism. That is why a group of twelve students decided to widen their experience as well as to put it into a specific scientific framework and – with the help of modern technology – to transmit it to the wider public.

The short documentary movies produced within the project Migrating Art Historians deal with various topics linked to the phenomenon of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages and today. The films 2 to 5 speak about the different perceptions and intellectual constructions about the Medieval art; about the importance of light in the life of a pilgrim and in the life of an artifact; about the perception of time during the pilgrimage and about the alimentation of a medieval and contemporary pilgrim.