The Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan is pleased to announce the inaugural lecture in the Forsyth Lecture Series, to be delivered by Paul Binski, emeritus Professor of the History of Medieval Art at Cambridge University.
Since the Ancient World, engagement with visual art has recognized that perception has tremendous powers to reconfigure ‘stuff’ imaginatively. Aquinas, for example, stated that it is possible to separate representation and configuration. Later aestheticians, informed by analytical philosophy, referred to this capacity as ‘aspectual seeing’: seeing something ‘in’ a configuration, or more radically seeing the configuration ‘as’ something. This lecture returns to ‘aspectual seeing’ in the belief that it illuminates current debates about materiality, illusion, emotion and fiction in medieval art. In particular, it will reflect on (if not solve) the question of what human engagement with fictions consists of, whether that engagement can motivate us to action and, if so, what that engagement tells us about the art-life divide as presently understood by some art historians and critics.