Topic

Seven speakers will consider the role played by fragments and fragmentation in the medieval and modern understanding of works of art. Their half-hour papers will address such topics as the use or reuse of fragments in the creation of new works; quotation and replication as a kind of fragmentation; fragmentation of the perceptual or conceptual experience of a work; deliberate fragmentation or fragmentariness in works such as pilgrims’ tokens or votive objects; and the modern engagement with fragments as an attempt to reconstruct lost works of art, lost visual traditions, or lost cultural practices.

Schedule:

Coffee service, 9 am

Morning session, 10 am to noon:

Susanne Wittekind (Universität zu Köln), “Fragmented and Recomposed: Jewellery and Ivories Reused on Precious Book Covers”

Gregor Kalas (University of Tennessee at Knoxville), “Fragments of the Arch of the Argentarii and the Early Medieval Remaking of San Giorgio in Velabro in Rome” 

Shirin Fozi (University of Pittsburgh), “The Knotted Philology of the Quedlinburg Carpet Fragments: Image, Text, and Context, ca. 1200”

Afternoon sessions, 2pm–5:15 pm:

Patricia Blessing (Princeton University), “Fragments of Paradise: Ottoman Wall Paintings in the 15^th century”

Henry D. Schilb (Princeton University), “Fragments of What? Three and a Half Ways of Looking at Patchwork Epitaphioi”

Coffee break, 3 pm

Kathryn M. Rudy (University of Saint Andrews), “Fragmenting the Face of Christ in the Late Middle Ages”

William Diebold, Reed College), “‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’: Medieval Art as Redemption in Post-World-War-II Cologne”