Mostly Medieval:Images and Reflections

I've been thinking about ivories for a while now.  Then, a few days ago, I got to touch some. To explain more: I've been working on an article on ivory Virgin and Child statuettes for several years now.  Originally, it was an outgrowth of the work on Virgin and Child imagery that I was doing for the book that I've also been working on for a long time now (about 10 years).  I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of Virgin and Child statues that I was encountering in museums and so I decided I would limit my work for the book on larger-scale stone and wood versions and then use some of the same contextual and theoretical framework for a separate article on ivories ( for some of that thinking see this previous post ).  But I quickly realized that I would also have to take into account in the difference in material and all of the differences that go with it - in size and scale, in ownership and viewership. I started to read up on ivory and got more and more interested in t

Note: I've been writing poetry over this past few months by cutting-and-pasting (literally with scissors and tape) words and phrases from scholarly art-historical texts.  I've posted examples on some other blogs: Fumblr and the Material Collective group blog.  Here I turn that activity onto one of my own texts, a recently rejected article on ivory Virgin and Child statuettes, to both rescue something from this rejection and advance my thinking on this project by coming at it in a different way. Embellishing Ivories Allow us to imagine: some ivory buttons, an ivory comb several ivory and silver boxes. And a set of metal chains - set into a gold flower on the Virgin's chest. Gilt in her hair, red on the inside of her veil, a green belt with gilt embellishments. Supplemented by precious stones, emeralds as well as an emerald, and thirty-two pearls (one missing). Allow to us image, against the background of the scarcity that just appears from behind her,

This post has been brewing for a while - since my Spring Break trip to Paris.  It springs from one of my visits to the Cluny during that trip, when I ended up in the Unicorn tapestries room. I've been in there before of course, if only because it is the only air-conditioned space in the museum.  My first month-long trip summer trip to Paris I took in July instead of June and it was hot (and a little smelly).  I was spending my afternoons in museums looking at Virgin and Child statues and most of the Cluny's are gathered in a gallery right next to the tapestries room, so I would duck in there to sit in the a.c. for a bit whenever I got just too uncomfortable.  On this most recent trip, in March, it was freezing cold and I got routed through the room because that space with the Virgins was briefly closed for some reason. And for some other reason I was struck by the panel above, sometimes labelled as the Lady and the Unicorn.  Struck not so much by its imagery, as by its

I loved my Kalamazoo paper for this year.  Just absolutely fucking LOVED it! Which is pretty amazing, since before I wrote it, I'd not written anything in months and was despairing a bit about my ability to write.  I was deep into this curriculum craziness that is going on at my university and was feeling more like a mid-level bureaucrat than a scholar or an intellectual or a writer or a person or...  You may have noticed that I've not even written here since February, when I try to write at least one post per month.  I have to dive back into all that craziness now, but I want to try and capture this feeling first (in fact I fell down the curriculum rabbit hole for about a week and am now coming back to finish this and try and recapture that feeling). On the one hand, the paper was a tight historical argument about the tombs of Henry Chichele (above) and Richard Fleming understood in the context of Lollard anti-image rhetoric and occasional acts of iconoclasm (given that

I've loved these since I first saw them: Kate Clark's Ceremony on display at CSU gallery as part of Animatopoeia: A Most Peculiar (Post Modern) Bestiary, an exhibit curated by Art History major Omid Tavakoli ( here for the artist's website and here for the gallery's ).   Other people kept telling me they found these creatures creepy, but of course one of the things I love about sculpture in general is its creepiness .  And I didn't find these creepy at all, I thought they were so - Nice.  Gentle.  Kind.  Maybe it's the tilts of their heads, all off a bit to the side, as if in sympathy with their observers. Maybe its their skinny little legs, and hooves like pointed toes, that make them seem so delicate and their stances so precarious. Like this guy, I got up close to peer into their faces and try - but never succeed - in meeting their gazes.  Maybe that's what others read as creepiness, the way the creatures seem to draw you in to look, but then