Book by Saskia C. Quené
Between Figure and Ground: Seeing in Premodernity, 2025
The terms "figure" and "ground" became fundamental to art-historical analysis and writing over th... more The terms "figure" and "ground" became fundamental to art-historical analysis and writing over the course of the twentieth century. But is this dichotomy suited to describe premodern art and artifacts? In Between Figure and Ground: Seeing in Premodernity, essays by Claudia Blümle, Gottfried Boehm, Péter Bokody, Beate Fricke, Bruno Haas, David Young Kim, Aden Kumler, Christopher Lakey, Karin Leonhard, Jürgen Müller, Veronica Peselmann, Christoph Poetsch, Raphael Rosenberg, Tom Steinert, Nicola Suthor, Noa Turel, and Saskia Quené call into question long-standing habits of seeing and understanding figure-ground relations, expand art-historical vocabularies, and productively challenge anachronistic attachments to modernist paradigms. Offering new approaches and methodological reflections from art history and theory, Bildwissenschaft, and art historiography, this volume provides stimulating answers to the question: What can be seen and described between premodern figures and grounds?
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Goldgrund und Perspektive. Fra Angelico im Glanz des Quattrocento, 2022
Dieses Buch ist die erste monographische Studie zum Goldgrund in der italienischen Tafelmalerei. ... more Dieses Buch ist die erste monographische Studie zum Goldgrund in der italienischen Tafelmalerei. Anhand der Tafelbilder Fra Angelicos zeigt Saskia C. Quené, dass der mittelalterliche Goldgrund nicht einer neuzeitlichen Perspektive gegenübersteht, sondern selbst perspektivisch gedacht werden muss. Das Ergebnis ist eine grundlegende Revision der Geschichte perspektivischer Darstellungsformen im Glanz des Quattrocento. Darüber hinaus liefert das Buch Antworten auf die Frage, wie der Goldgrund im 20. Jahrhundert zum blinden Fleck der Kunstgeschichte werden konnte.
Ausgezeichnet mit dem Willibald-Sauerländer-Preis des Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte.
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Papers by Saskia C. Quené
Different Visions, 2023
This paper examines figures, grounds, and gold in two panel paintings by Fra Angelico with restri... more This paper examines figures, grounds, and gold in two panel paintings by Fra Angelico with restricted accessibility: His Madonna dell'Umiltà from the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia (fig. 1) and his Virgin and Child from The Alana Collection (fig. 2). I initially draw attention to the interplay of forms, lines, metals, and pigments through close looking and material analysis. In doing so, I explore Angelico's representation of humility, arguing that the painter and monk reflects on the close connection between "humilitas" (humility) and "humus" (ground) visually, theologically, and theoretically, enabling contemplation on the subject of "ground." To better comprehend Angelico's visual strategies, I connect his way of employing materials and techniques to observations of the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin. Yet, this essay nevertheless critiques the usage of modernist terms like "figure" and "ground," and proposes to expand the iconographic scope of the Madonna dell'Umiltà by discussing the place of "ground" in gold leaf panel painting.
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Enzyklopädie der Genauigkeit, 2021
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21: Inquiries into Art, History and the Visual, 2020
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Blümle, Claudia/Wismer, Beat (Hrsg.): Hinter dem Vorhang. Verhüllung und Enthüllung seit der Rena... more Blümle, Claudia/Wismer, Beat (Hrsg.): Hinter dem Vorhang. Verhüllung und Enthüllung seit der Renaissance – Von Tizian bis Christo, Ausst. Kat. Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, München 2016
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Conferences by Saskia C. Quené
Call for Papers "Illuminating Shadows", 2024
As Cennino Cennini noted in his Libro dell'Arte, even gold leaf has a dark side. Both appearance ... more As Cennino Cennini noted in his Libro dell'Arte, even gold leaf has a dark side. Both appearance forms can be observed in panel paintings and illuminated manuscripts. However, scholarship has traditionally highlighted gold leaf's translucent, reflective, and refractive qualities and emphasized its metaphorical and metaphysical luminosity. Meanwhile, shadows played significant roles in medieval culture: Virgin Mary got "overshadowed" by the Holy Spirit in the presence of the angel Gabriel (Lk 1,35), optical treatises from the 12th century onwards discussed shadows as natural phenomena, and the moon cast its shadow on the sphere of the earth. The worldly realm becomes the "umbra futurorum."
The section "Illuminating Shadows" invites contributions exploring shadows in relation to specific artistic materials and techniques (precious metals, relief, sculpture, architecture), iconographies (representations of the Holy Spirit, clouds, eclipses), or as discussed in written sources (on astronomy, cosmology, geometry, optics). In doing so, papers might address the following questions: Where, how, and when were shadows (in)visible? How do and did shadow effects guide the production and perception of artifacts? How can we understand shadows iconographically (and theologically) beyond their opposition to light? How do Latin and Arabic treatises concerned with catoptrical and dioptrical phenomena refer to penumbrae, shades, and shadows? Which consequences follow from these investigations for the (photographic) (re)presentation of medieval artifacts in publications or exhibition spaces?
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A central hermeneutic problem in the interpretation (and ultimately the valuation) of premodern m... more A central hermeneutic problem in the interpretation (and ultimately the valuation) of premodern material culture is that modern viewers stand under anachronistic presuppositions decisively shaped by modernity. This becomes particularly clear in the concept of Newtonian "space," which stands in an antagonistic relationship to "place," and, therefore, to the Aristotelian “topos.”
In the first half of the 20th century, the topic of "pictorial space" was central in art historical scholarship, as documented by Erwin Panofsky's much-cited essay "Perspektive als 'symbolische Form'" (1924-1925) or Pavel Florensky’s “Reverse Perspective” (1920). Panofsky employs “Raum” as an isotropic, homogenous, and endless space. Successively, German scholarship developed a rich Begriffsgeschichte around the term, linking it to geometric operations like linear perspective. In Anglo-American scholarship, “space” remained openly ambiguous, and Panofsky’s text wasn’t translated until 1997.
The interdisciplinary workshop on “space,” “Raum,” and “topos” aims to shed light on the question of how premodern texts and images present spatial configurations. In doing so, the workshop contributes to a critical revision of modernist paradigms informing the perception and reception of premodern material culture. How were place and spatiality sensually perceived, philosophically thought, and pictorially visualized?
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Much has been written about the mechanics of projection and perspective, on how three dimensions ... more Much has been written about the mechanics of projection and perspective, on how three dimensions can be captured on the picture plane and drawn plans translated into architectural geometries. Art historical searches for interpretive and structural geometries – tracing circles, squares, and triangles – have been mobilized as pedagogical truisms, cognitive tests, and reflections of cultural ideals. In doing so, the historical relationship between a geometric tract and an artistic creation remains, too often, contingent. This session explores new approaches to the question of how the measured movements of artists and artisans emerged in dialogue with geometric knowl- edge. How can art objects serve as evidence of geometric thinking? What do current discourses on the significance of geometry and art privilege? What steps must be taken to broaden the conversation, loosen the grasp of western antiquity, and foreground heterogeneity, interdependencies, and cross-fertilizations?
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The terms “figure” and “ground” became fundamental to art critique, art historical scholarship, a... more The terms “figure” and “ground” became fundamental to art critique, art historical scholarship, and academic writing over the course of the twentieth century. However, to what extent this dichotomy is suited to describe premodern art remains largely unquestioned. To bridge this gap, the international conference “Between Figure and Ground: Seeing in Premodernity” brings together art history, image theory, Bildwissenschaft, historiography, and methodological reflections. It aims to critique and expand vocabularies used to describe, analyze, and interpret medieval and early modern artifacts. Eight sessions over the course of three days offer the opportunity to productively revise anachronistic attachments to modernist paradigms. What can be seen and described between picture planes and pictorial spaces and thus between figure and ground?
Die Begriffe „Figur“ und „Grund“ wurden im 20. Jahrhundert zu fundamentalen Begriffen der Kunstkritik, der kunsthistorischen Forschung und des wissenschaftlichen Schreibens. Ob diese Dichotomie jedoch geeignet ist, auch vormoderne Artefakte zu beschreiben, ist weitestgehend unhinterfragt geblieben. Vor diesem Hintergrund bringt die Konferenz „Zwischen Figur und Grund: Sehen in der Vormoderne“ aktuelle Positionen aus der Kunstgeschichte, image theory, Bildwissenschaft, Historiographie und Methodologie zusammen und verfolgt das Ziel, das Vokabular zur Beschreibung und Analyse vormoderne Artefakte kritisch zu erweitern. Acht Sektionen an drei Tagen bieten die Chance, das Sehen in der Vormoderne produktiv von seinen modernistischen Begriffsparadigmen zu lösen und der Frage auf den Grund zu gehen, was sich im Zwischenraum von Bildfläche und Bildraum – zwischen Figur und Grund – zeigen und beschreiben lässt.
Thursday, June 9
09.30
Welcome: Aden Kumler, eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image
Introduction: Saskia Quené, University of California, Berkeley
I Unter der Oberfläche // Beneath the Surface
Moderation // Chair: Saskia Quené
10.00 Ittai Weinryb
Faces and Vases: A Medieval Romance
Bard Graduate Center, New York
10.45 Pause // Break
11.15 Christopher Lakey
The Pictorial Space of Sgraffito: Figure and Gold Ground
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
12.00 Noa Turel
Figuring Space in Fifteenth-Century Painting
University of Alabama at Birmingham
12.45 Mittagspause // Lunch Break
II Peripatetisches Sehen // Moving Spectators
Moderation // Chair: Theresa Holler
14.30 Matteo Burioni
Figure and Ground in Ceiling Paintings
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
15.15 Raphael Rosenberg
Depicted Space or Surface Composition – What Guides the Beholder's Eye?
Universität Wien
16.00 Pause // Break
16.30 The Desert in the Lagoon
A film essay by David Young Kim and Amelia Saul, with an introduction by the authors
18.00 Abendessen (auf Einladung) // Dinner (on invitation)
Friday, June 10
III Physisches und Metaphysisches // Physics and Metaphysics
Moderation // Chair: Matteo Burioni
09.30 Christoph Poetsch
Zwei Meta-Physiken des Bildes? Zur Figur-Grund-Relation in der Vormoderne aus der Perspektive dreistelliger Bildbegriffe
Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
10.15 Nicolai Kölmel
Conflicting Layers. Pictorial Irony in North Italian Material Culture around 1500
Universität Basel
11.00 Pause // Break
IV Beschreiben und Übersetzen // Describing and Translating
Moderation // Chair: Aden Kumler
11.30 Veronica Peselmann
Die Figur/Grund Dichotomie in bildhistoriographischen Quellen (1780-1890)
Universität Bielefeld
12.15 Tom Steinert
Zwischen Gestaltpsychologie und Kunstwissenschaft. Zur Ideen- und Begriffsgeschichte von „Figur/Grund“
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
13.00 Mittagspause // Lunch Break
14.30 Bruno Haas
Bildkörper und Feldmuster. Zu Theorie und Praxis in der Malerei des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts
Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris
15.15 Jürgen Müller
Der tanzende Galgen. Pieter Bruegels d. Ä. Tafel „Die Elster auf dem Galgen“ in neuer Deutung
Technische Universität Dresden
16.00 Pause // Break
V Aus der Tiefe // Out of the Depths
Moderation // Chair: Sophie Schweinfurth
16.30 Péter Bokody
Deep Surfaces in Renaissance Painting
University of Plymouth
17.15 Beate Fricke
Horizons. Grounding and Figuring (out) Pictures
Universität Bern
18.00 Apéro riche auf der Rheinterrasse // Apéro riche on the Rhine terrace
Saturday, June 11
VI Ephemere Bilder // Ephemeral Images
Moderation // Chair: Fabian Felder
10.00 Aden Kumler
Between figure and ground: Painting shadows in the Middle Ages
Universität Basel
10.45 Karin Leonhard
Schall und Rauch? Die (un)sichtbaren Welten des David Bailly
Universität Konstanz
11.30 Pause // Break
VII Linie und Licht // Between the Lines
Moderation // Chair: Matteo Burioni
12.00 Marion Gartenmeister
Ein Streifzug durch die Glasmalerei: Farbe, Schwarzlot, Transparenz
Vitrocentre Romont
12.45 Lunch Break
14.30 Meekyung MacMurdie
Framing Figuration in Arabic Manuscripts
University of Utah
15.15 Pause // Break
VIII Schwere und Schwerelosigkeit // Weight and Weightlessness
Moderation // Chair: Saskia Quené
15.45 Claudia Blümle
Textil als Grund. Entfaltete Ehrentücher in der frühneuzeitlichen Malerei
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
16.30 Nicola Suthor
Imaginäre Schwerkraft: Zum Figur/Grund Verhältnis in der Barocken Skulptur
Yale University
17.15 Abschlussdiskussion // Concluding remarks
18.00 Abendessen (auf Einladung) // Dinner (on invitation
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Die viersprachige Tagung „Penser l'image en situation. Exposer le peinture médiévale à la lumière... more Die viersprachige Tagung „Penser l'image en situation. Exposer le peinture médiévale à la lumière du jour“ untersucht, wie Standortbedingungen Strukturen von Bildern prägen und welche Konsequenzen die Rekonstruktionen ursprünglicher ikonischer Situationen für Präsentationsbedingungen in Museen und Ausstellungen mit sich bringen. Darüber hinaus schafft die Tagung die Grundlage für ein Forschungsprojekt mit dem Titel „Die historisch-kritische Ausstellungspraxis“. Angestrebt wird eine historisch-kritisch geleitete, lichtkritische Wende in der Erarbeitung neuer Ausstellungsdispositive.
Internationale Expertinnen und Experten aus Kunstgeschichte, Museologie, Restaurierung, Museumsarchitektur, Museumspraxis sowie digitaler Reproduktions- und Lichttechnik erörtern an verschiedenen Beispielen der Kunst des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, welche Beziehung zwischen ursprünglichem Standortlicht und Bildlicht besteht.
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Is it possible to inhabit space beyond one’s own dimension? In Flatland, Edwin Abbott’s biting so... more Is it possible to inhabit space beyond one’s own dimension? In Flatland, Edwin Abbott’s biting social commentary by means of geometric thought experiment, the protagonist, Square A, repeatedly confronts the limits of communicating across dimensions. His attempts to explain a planar figure to points and lines comes to naught as common sense, empiricism, and demonstrative reasoning prove to be of no use. Square A’s own conversion to three-dimensionality very nearly also fails. Having mastered sight recognition in his own dimension, Square A is finally stunned into belief as he is launched above Flatland, physically and imaginatively moved out of one dimensionality into another to view the unending horizon.
A decade later, in the opening lines of his Stilfragen (1893), Alois Riegl described the shift from copying nature in clay to inventing the drawn, engraved, and painted line as the “truly creative act.” Through abandoning mimetic instinct in favor of a free imagination-and moving from three-dimensional models to seemingly two-dimensional representations-art and artists were born. In turns self-serving, unfalsifiable, and absurd, Riegl’s polemics nonetheless approach Abbott’s fantasy to coalesce around the weighty issue at hand, namely, what is at stake in moving between dimensions?
Much has been written about the mechanics of projection and perspective, on the ways in which three dimensions can be captured on the picture plane, or on the role of drawn plans in executing feats of engineering. In this workshop, we hope to foreground instead other socially-contingent processes like imagination, memory, and the mind’s vision. What can be gained if we understand images, schemata, objects, architecture, and pictures not as direct outputs of a particular mode of perception but as representations of human creativity?
The workshop on medieval Western and Islamic art and art history will be held online in four blocks of 90 minutes.
Our participants:
Alex Brey, Wellesley College
Tamara Golan, University of Chicago
Alya Karame, American University of Beirut
Megan McNamee, University of Edinburgh
Eszter Nagy, Independent Researcher, Budapest
Yael Rice, Amherst College
Martin Schwarz, University of Basel
David Zagoury, The Getty Research Institute
Emily Zazulia, University of California, Berkeley
Organized by Meekyung MacMurdie and Saskia C. Quené
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Talks by Saskia C. Quené
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Medieval methods to visualise time evolved in dialogue with cosmological and musical knowledge. L... more Medieval methods to visualise time evolved in dialogue with cosmological and musical knowledge. Located at the nexus of sensory experience and imaginative thought, the quadrivium of musica, cosmology, arithmetic, and geometry remained firmly anchored in the visual realm. In medieval manuscripts, time, and eternity materialise as intricate diagrams, graphs, and line drawings meticulously executed using parchment, ink, and pigments.
An in-depth examination of some of these diagrams dating back to the 9th and 10th centuries will demonstrate how medieval scribes and scholars ingeniously devised new shapes and forms to traverse between dimensions, shedding light on the richness of their intellectual and creative pursuits.
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Devoid of inscriptions, titles, or written notes, the thirty-two full-page illuminations in New Y... more Devoid of inscriptions, titles, or written notes, the thirty-two full-page illuminations in New York's Morgan Library MS M.736 (fols. 7r-22v) tell the life and miracles of St. Edmund, King of East Anglia. Challenging the reciprocal relationship between text and image, pictorial elements such as ladders, tau-staffs, spears, and feet extend beyond the manuscript's frames and margins, providing cues to the narrator. In doing so, the manuscript’s dual scheme becomes a vital feature in bridging the gap between surface and space, as well as between viewers and listeners. On a theoretical level, my paper critically explores the opposition between "Fläche" and "Raum" (Otto Pächt) developed in reference to the Morgan cycle's miniatures, contributing to the broader discourse on the place of "surface" in art historiography.
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Medieval methods to visualize music developed in dialogue with geometrical, arithmetical, cosmolo... more Medieval methods to visualize music developed in dialogue with geometrical, arithmetical, cosmological, grammatical, philosophical, logical, and theological knowledge. Located between the sensory and the imaginative, the quadrivium of musica, geometry, arithmetic, and cosmology was nonetheless grounded in the realm of the visual. Visualizations of musica appear in manuscripts as diagrams, graphs, and line drawings using parchment, ink, and pigments. While Art History as a scholarly discipline only evolved in Modernity, music theory – rooted in Antiquity – took a long turn from being part of the quadrivial disciplines in the Middle Ages to becoming associated with musical practice, in which notational systems started to overshadow diagrammatic strategies of visualizations. Going beyond Lessing’s Laokoon, my talk draws from recent art historical approaches to medieval and especially cosmological diagrams and aims to question what facilitated the neglect of musical material within the field of Art History, how this history is entangled with the history of musica – and what that means for us today.
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Book by Saskia C. Quené
Ausgezeichnet mit dem Willibald-Sauerländer-Preis des Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte.
Papers by Saskia C. Quené
Conferences by Saskia C. Quené
The section "Illuminating Shadows" invites contributions exploring shadows in relation to specific artistic materials and techniques (precious metals, relief, sculpture, architecture), iconographies (representations of the Holy Spirit, clouds, eclipses), or as discussed in written sources (on astronomy, cosmology, geometry, optics). In doing so, papers might address the following questions: Where, how, and when were shadows (in)visible? How do and did shadow effects guide the production and perception of artifacts? How can we understand shadows iconographically (and theologically) beyond their opposition to light? How do Latin and Arabic treatises concerned with catoptrical and dioptrical phenomena refer to penumbrae, shades, and shadows? Which consequences follow from these investigations for the (photographic) (re)presentation of medieval artifacts in publications or exhibition spaces?
In the first half of the 20th century, the topic of "pictorial space" was central in art historical scholarship, as documented by Erwin Panofsky's much-cited essay "Perspektive als 'symbolische Form'" (1924-1925) or Pavel Florensky’s “Reverse Perspective” (1920). Panofsky employs “Raum” as an isotropic, homogenous, and endless space. Successively, German scholarship developed a rich Begriffsgeschichte around the term, linking it to geometric operations like linear perspective. In Anglo-American scholarship, “space” remained openly ambiguous, and Panofsky’s text wasn’t translated until 1997.
The interdisciplinary workshop on “space,” “Raum,” and “topos” aims to shed light on the question of how premodern texts and images present spatial configurations. In doing so, the workshop contributes to a critical revision of modernist paradigms informing the perception and reception of premodern material culture. How were place and spatiality sensually perceived, philosophically thought, and pictorially visualized?
Die Begriffe „Figur“ und „Grund“ wurden im 20. Jahrhundert zu fundamentalen Begriffen der Kunstkritik, der kunsthistorischen Forschung und des wissenschaftlichen Schreibens. Ob diese Dichotomie jedoch geeignet ist, auch vormoderne Artefakte zu beschreiben, ist weitestgehend unhinterfragt geblieben. Vor diesem Hintergrund bringt die Konferenz „Zwischen Figur und Grund: Sehen in der Vormoderne“ aktuelle Positionen aus der Kunstgeschichte, image theory, Bildwissenschaft, Historiographie und Methodologie zusammen und verfolgt das Ziel, das Vokabular zur Beschreibung und Analyse vormoderne Artefakte kritisch zu erweitern. Acht Sektionen an drei Tagen bieten die Chance, das Sehen in der Vormoderne produktiv von seinen modernistischen Begriffsparadigmen zu lösen und der Frage auf den Grund zu gehen, was sich im Zwischenraum von Bildfläche und Bildraum – zwischen Figur und Grund – zeigen und beschreiben lässt.
Thursday, June 9
09.30
Welcome: Aden Kumler, eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image
Introduction: Saskia Quené, University of California, Berkeley
I Unter der Oberfläche // Beneath the Surface
Moderation // Chair: Saskia Quené
10.00 Ittai Weinryb
Faces and Vases: A Medieval Romance
Bard Graduate Center, New York
10.45 Pause // Break
11.15 Christopher Lakey
The Pictorial Space of Sgraffito: Figure and Gold Ground
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
12.00 Noa Turel
Figuring Space in Fifteenth-Century Painting
University of Alabama at Birmingham
12.45 Mittagspause // Lunch Break
II Peripatetisches Sehen // Moving Spectators
Moderation // Chair: Theresa Holler
14.30 Matteo Burioni
Figure and Ground in Ceiling Paintings
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
15.15 Raphael Rosenberg
Depicted Space or Surface Composition – What Guides the Beholder's Eye?
Universität Wien
16.00 Pause // Break
16.30 The Desert in the Lagoon
A film essay by David Young Kim and Amelia Saul, with an introduction by the authors
18.00 Abendessen (auf Einladung) // Dinner (on invitation)
Friday, June 10
III Physisches und Metaphysisches // Physics and Metaphysics
Moderation // Chair: Matteo Burioni
09.30 Christoph Poetsch
Zwei Meta-Physiken des Bildes? Zur Figur-Grund-Relation in der Vormoderne aus der Perspektive dreistelliger Bildbegriffe
Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
10.15 Nicolai Kölmel
Conflicting Layers. Pictorial Irony in North Italian Material Culture around 1500
Universität Basel
11.00 Pause // Break
IV Beschreiben und Übersetzen // Describing and Translating
Moderation // Chair: Aden Kumler
11.30 Veronica Peselmann
Die Figur/Grund Dichotomie in bildhistoriographischen Quellen (1780-1890)
Universität Bielefeld
12.15 Tom Steinert
Zwischen Gestaltpsychologie und Kunstwissenschaft. Zur Ideen- und Begriffsgeschichte von „Figur/Grund“
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
13.00 Mittagspause // Lunch Break
14.30 Bruno Haas
Bildkörper und Feldmuster. Zu Theorie und Praxis in der Malerei des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts
Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris
15.15 Jürgen Müller
Der tanzende Galgen. Pieter Bruegels d. Ä. Tafel „Die Elster auf dem Galgen“ in neuer Deutung
Technische Universität Dresden
16.00 Pause // Break
V Aus der Tiefe // Out of the Depths
Moderation // Chair: Sophie Schweinfurth
16.30 Péter Bokody
Deep Surfaces in Renaissance Painting
University of Plymouth
17.15 Beate Fricke
Horizons. Grounding and Figuring (out) Pictures
Universität Bern
18.00 Apéro riche auf der Rheinterrasse // Apéro riche on the Rhine terrace
Saturday, June 11
VI Ephemere Bilder // Ephemeral Images
Moderation // Chair: Fabian Felder
10.00 Aden Kumler
Between figure and ground: Painting shadows in the Middle Ages
Universität Basel
10.45 Karin Leonhard
Schall und Rauch? Die (un)sichtbaren Welten des David Bailly
Universität Konstanz
11.30 Pause // Break
VII Linie und Licht // Between the Lines
Moderation // Chair: Matteo Burioni
12.00 Marion Gartenmeister
Ein Streifzug durch die Glasmalerei: Farbe, Schwarzlot, Transparenz
Vitrocentre Romont
12.45 Lunch Break
14.30 Meekyung MacMurdie
Framing Figuration in Arabic Manuscripts
University of Utah
15.15 Pause // Break
VIII Schwere und Schwerelosigkeit // Weight and Weightlessness
Moderation // Chair: Saskia Quené
15.45 Claudia Blümle
Textil als Grund. Entfaltete Ehrentücher in der frühneuzeitlichen Malerei
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
16.30 Nicola Suthor
Imaginäre Schwerkraft: Zum Figur/Grund Verhältnis in der Barocken Skulptur
Yale University
17.15 Abschlussdiskussion // Concluding remarks
18.00 Abendessen (auf Einladung) // Dinner (on invitation
Internationale Expertinnen und Experten aus Kunstgeschichte, Museologie, Restaurierung, Museumsarchitektur, Museumspraxis sowie digitaler Reproduktions- und Lichttechnik erörtern an verschiedenen Beispielen der Kunst des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, welche Beziehung zwischen ursprünglichem Standortlicht und Bildlicht besteht.
A decade later, in the opening lines of his Stilfragen (1893), Alois Riegl described the shift from copying nature in clay to inventing the drawn, engraved, and painted line as the “truly creative act.” Through abandoning mimetic instinct in favor of a free imagination-and moving from three-dimensional models to seemingly two-dimensional representations-art and artists were born. In turns self-serving, unfalsifiable, and absurd, Riegl’s polemics nonetheless approach Abbott’s fantasy to coalesce around the weighty issue at hand, namely, what is at stake in moving between dimensions?
Much has been written about the mechanics of projection and perspective, on the ways in which three dimensions can be captured on the picture plane, or on the role of drawn plans in executing feats of engineering. In this workshop, we hope to foreground instead other socially-contingent processes like imagination, memory, and the mind’s vision. What can be gained if we understand images, schemata, objects, architecture, and pictures not as direct outputs of a particular mode of perception but as representations of human creativity?
The workshop on medieval Western and Islamic art and art history will be held online in four blocks of 90 minutes.
Our participants:
Alex Brey, Wellesley College
Tamara Golan, University of Chicago
Alya Karame, American University of Beirut
Megan McNamee, University of Edinburgh
Eszter Nagy, Independent Researcher, Budapest
Yael Rice, Amherst College
Martin Schwarz, University of Basel
David Zagoury, The Getty Research Institute
Emily Zazulia, University of California, Berkeley
Organized by Meekyung MacMurdie and Saskia C. Quené
Talks by Saskia C. Quené
An in-depth examination of some of these diagrams dating back to the 9th and 10th centuries will demonstrate how medieval scribes and scholars ingeniously devised new shapes and forms to traverse between dimensions, shedding light on the richness of their intellectual and creative pursuits.
Ausgezeichnet mit dem Willibald-Sauerländer-Preis des Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte.
The section "Illuminating Shadows" invites contributions exploring shadows in relation to specific artistic materials and techniques (precious metals, relief, sculpture, architecture), iconographies (representations of the Holy Spirit, clouds, eclipses), or as discussed in written sources (on astronomy, cosmology, geometry, optics). In doing so, papers might address the following questions: Where, how, and when were shadows (in)visible? How do and did shadow effects guide the production and perception of artifacts? How can we understand shadows iconographically (and theologically) beyond their opposition to light? How do Latin and Arabic treatises concerned with catoptrical and dioptrical phenomena refer to penumbrae, shades, and shadows? Which consequences follow from these investigations for the (photographic) (re)presentation of medieval artifacts in publications or exhibition spaces?
In the first half of the 20th century, the topic of "pictorial space" was central in art historical scholarship, as documented by Erwin Panofsky's much-cited essay "Perspektive als 'symbolische Form'" (1924-1925) or Pavel Florensky’s “Reverse Perspective” (1920). Panofsky employs “Raum” as an isotropic, homogenous, and endless space. Successively, German scholarship developed a rich Begriffsgeschichte around the term, linking it to geometric operations like linear perspective. In Anglo-American scholarship, “space” remained openly ambiguous, and Panofsky’s text wasn’t translated until 1997.
The interdisciplinary workshop on “space,” “Raum,” and “topos” aims to shed light on the question of how premodern texts and images present spatial configurations. In doing so, the workshop contributes to a critical revision of modernist paradigms informing the perception and reception of premodern material culture. How were place and spatiality sensually perceived, philosophically thought, and pictorially visualized?
Die Begriffe „Figur“ und „Grund“ wurden im 20. Jahrhundert zu fundamentalen Begriffen der Kunstkritik, der kunsthistorischen Forschung und des wissenschaftlichen Schreibens. Ob diese Dichotomie jedoch geeignet ist, auch vormoderne Artefakte zu beschreiben, ist weitestgehend unhinterfragt geblieben. Vor diesem Hintergrund bringt die Konferenz „Zwischen Figur und Grund: Sehen in der Vormoderne“ aktuelle Positionen aus der Kunstgeschichte, image theory, Bildwissenschaft, Historiographie und Methodologie zusammen und verfolgt das Ziel, das Vokabular zur Beschreibung und Analyse vormoderne Artefakte kritisch zu erweitern. Acht Sektionen an drei Tagen bieten die Chance, das Sehen in der Vormoderne produktiv von seinen modernistischen Begriffsparadigmen zu lösen und der Frage auf den Grund zu gehen, was sich im Zwischenraum von Bildfläche und Bildraum – zwischen Figur und Grund – zeigen und beschreiben lässt.
Thursday, June 9
09.30
Welcome: Aden Kumler, eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image
Introduction: Saskia Quené, University of California, Berkeley
I Unter der Oberfläche // Beneath the Surface
Moderation // Chair: Saskia Quené
10.00 Ittai Weinryb
Faces and Vases: A Medieval Romance
Bard Graduate Center, New York
10.45 Pause // Break
11.15 Christopher Lakey
The Pictorial Space of Sgraffito: Figure and Gold Ground
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
12.00 Noa Turel
Figuring Space in Fifteenth-Century Painting
University of Alabama at Birmingham
12.45 Mittagspause // Lunch Break
II Peripatetisches Sehen // Moving Spectators
Moderation // Chair: Theresa Holler
14.30 Matteo Burioni
Figure and Ground in Ceiling Paintings
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
15.15 Raphael Rosenberg
Depicted Space or Surface Composition – What Guides the Beholder's Eye?
Universität Wien
16.00 Pause // Break
16.30 The Desert in the Lagoon
A film essay by David Young Kim and Amelia Saul, with an introduction by the authors
18.00 Abendessen (auf Einladung) // Dinner (on invitation)
Friday, June 10
III Physisches und Metaphysisches // Physics and Metaphysics
Moderation // Chair: Matteo Burioni
09.30 Christoph Poetsch
Zwei Meta-Physiken des Bildes? Zur Figur-Grund-Relation in der Vormoderne aus der Perspektive dreistelliger Bildbegriffe
Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
10.15 Nicolai Kölmel
Conflicting Layers. Pictorial Irony in North Italian Material Culture around 1500
Universität Basel
11.00 Pause // Break
IV Beschreiben und Übersetzen // Describing and Translating
Moderation // Chair: Aden Kumler
11.30 Veronica Peselmann
Die Figur/Grund Dichotomie in bildhistoriographischen Quellen (1780-1890)
Universität Bielefeld
12.15 Tom Steinert
Zwischen Gestaltpsychologie und Kunstwissenschaft. Zur Ideen- und Begriffsgeschichte von „Figur/Grund“
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
13.00 Mittagspause // Lunch Break
14.30 Bruno Haas
Bildkörper und Feldmuster. Zu Theorie und Praxis in der Malerei des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts
Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris
15.15 Jürgen Müller
Der tanzende Galgen. Pieter Bruegels d. Ä. Tafel „Die Elster auf dem Galgen“ in neuer Deutung
Technische Universität Dresden
16.00 Pause // Break
V Aus der Tiefe // Out of the Depths
Moderation // Chair: Sophie Schweinfurth
16.30 Péter Bokody
Deep Surfaces in Renaissance Painting
University of Plymouth
17.15 Beate Fricke
Horizons. Grounding and Figuring (out) Pictures
Universität Bern
18.00 Apéro riche auf der Rheinterrasse // Apéro riche on the Rhine terrace
Saturday, June 11
VI Ephemere Bilder // Ephemeral Images
Moderation // Chair: Fabian Felder
10.00 Aden Kumler
Between figure and ground: Painting shadows in the Middle Ages
Universität Basel
10.45 Karin Leonhard
Schall und Rauch? Die (un)sichtbaren Welten des David Bailly
Universität Konstanz
11.30 Pause // Break
VII Linie und Licht // Between the Lines
Moderation // Chair: Matteo Burioni
12.00 Marion Gartenmeister
Ein Streifzug durch die Glasmalerei: Farbe, Schwarzlot, Transparenz
Vitrocentre Romont
12.45 Lunch Break
14.30 Meekyung MacMurdie
Framing Figuration in Arabic Manuscripts
University of Utah
15.15 Pause // Break
VIII Schwere und Schwerelosigkeit // Weight and Weightlessness
Moderation // Chair: Saskia Quené
15.45 Claudia Blümle
Textil als Grund. Entfaltete Ehrentücher in der frühneuzeitlichen Malerei
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
16.30 Nicola Suthor
Imaginäre Schwerkraft: Zum Figur/Grund Verhältnis in der Barocken Skulptur
Yale University
17.15 Abschlussdiskussion // Concluding remarks
18.00 Abendessen (auf Einladung) // Dinner (on invitation
Internationale Expertinnen und Experten aus Kunstgeschichte, Museologie, Restaurierung, Museumsarchitektur, Museumspraxis sowie digitaler Reproduktions- und Lichttechnik erörtern an verschiedenen Beispielen der Kunst des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, welche Beziehung zwischen ursprünglichem Standortlicht und Bildlicht besteht.
A decade later, in the opening lines of his Stilfragen (1893), Alois Riegl described the shift from copying nature in clay to inventing the drawn, engraved, and painted line as the “truly creative act.” Through abandoning mimetic instinct in favor of a free imagination-and moving from three-dimensional models to seemingly two-dimensional representations-art and artists were born. In turns self-serving, unfalsifiable, and absurd, Riegl’s polemics nonetheless approach Abbott’s fantasy to coalesce around the weighty issue at hand, namely, what is at stake in moving between dimensions?
Much has been written about the mechanics of projection and perspective, on the ways in which three dimensions can be captured on the picture plane, or on the role of drawn plans in executing feats of engineering. In this workshop, we hope to foreground instead other socially-contingent processes like imagination, memory, and the mind’s vision. What can be gained if we understand images, schemata, objects, architecture, and pictures not as direct outputs of a particular mode of perception but as representations of human creativity?
The workshop on medieval Western and Islamic art and art history will be held online in four blocks of 90 minutes.
Our participants:
Alex Brey, Wellesley College
Tamara Golan, University of Chicago
Alya Karame, American University of Beirut
Megan McNamee, University of Edinburgh
Eszter Nagy, Independent Researcher, Budapest
Yael Rice, Amherst College
Martin Schwarz, University of Basel
David Zagoury, The Getty Research Institute
Emily Zazulia, University of California, Berkeley
Organized by Meekyung MacMurdie and Saskia C. Quené
An in-depth examination of some of these diagrams dating back to the 9th and 10th centuries will demonstrate how medieval scribes and scholars ingeniously devised new shapes and forms to traverse between dimensions, shedding light on the richness of their intellectual and creative pursuits.
My paper investigates visualizations of acoustic phenomena in medieval manuscripts and diagrams between the 8th and the 12th centuries. Primarily due to modern disciplinary divides, the medial differences between “temporal” sound and “spatial” imagery have often been overstated. How can we identify, distinguish, and understand the strategies by which medieval scribes and scholars created new shapes and forms on parchment to move between dimensions while visualizing the ephemeral?
vorzubereiten und mit eigenen Fragen in die Seminarsitzungen zu kommen. Abschluss des Seminars mit einer Seminarprüfung.
Im Seminar werden wir uns anhand ausgewählter Bilder aus dem westlichen und dem byzantinischen Mittelalter in methodischer Vielfalt diesen und weiterführenden Fragen annähern. Zahlreiche apokryphe Texte (insbes. Protoevangelium des Jakobus und das Pseudo-Matthäus-Evangelium), die Schiften der Kirchenväter und Theologen des (frühen) Mittelalters, die Legende Aurea, Marienlyriken, die Meditationes Vitae Christi oder auch die Offenbarungen der Birgitta von Schweden tun sich dabei als besonders wertvolle Quellen zum Verständnis der Ikonographie der Verkündigung an Maria hervor und werden beispielsweise auch Antwort geben können auf die Fragen, warum Maria so oft liest (was liest sie?) oder näht (was näht sie?) wenn der Engel sie besucht, warum dieser Engel so oft von links kommt (stimmt das?) und was es mit der weissen Taube (und den fliegenden Babys?) auf sich hat.
Ausserdem werden wir diskutieren, wie sich die Bilder unterschiedlicher Gattungen und Materialien (Buchmalerei, Wandmalerei, Ikone, Tafelbild), Regionen und Jahrhunderten in ihren liturgischen und architektonischen, gesellschaftlichen und wirtschaftlichen Zusammenhängen verorten lassen und wie diese Zusammenhänge ihre Genese bedingten.
Spezifisch für das musikalische Kunstwerk ist, dass es zu seiner vollgültigen Realisierung nicht nur eines Rezipienten, sondern auch eines Ausführenden bzw. Interpreten bedarf. Und spezifisch ist gleichfalls, dass nach seiner Aufführung nichts von ihm übrig bleibt als die Erinnerung sowie der Notentext, der eben nicht das vollgültige Kunstwerk darstellt.
Wurden in der Angewiesenheit auf Aufführung sowie in der Zeitstruktur der Musik bis zum „performative turn“ der Künste vor allem nur Nachteile gesehen, so bildete sich seit dem frühen 19. Jahrhundert dennoch ein imaginäres Museum musikalischer Werke heraus. Je länger das Museum besteht, zeichnen sich nun aber auch umso klarer Schwächen und Stärken des musikalischen Werk-Konzeptes ab.
Folgende Themen kommen zur Sprache: Raumkunst und Zeitkunst – Notentext und musikalisches Werk – Komponist, Interpret, Rezipient: Wer hat das Sagen? – Beethoven und das imaginäre Museum der Musik – Was ist der Inhalt der Musik: Ausdruck von Gefühlen oder „tönend bewegte Formen“? – Werktreue in der Zeit vor Beethoven? – Fantasieren, Kolorieren, Variieren: Zum Verhältnis von Komposition und Improvisation – Das musikalische Werk nach dem „performative turn“ der Künste – Mozart forever?