The ICMA presents The Forsyth Lecture in Medieval Art, 2017
Series made possible through The Forsyth Lectureship on Medieval Art Fund, Named in Memory of George H. Forsyth, Jr. and William H. Forsyth.
Lectures by:
Dr. Jacqueline Jung, Yale University
Wednesday March 8, 5:30pm
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR
Thursday March 9, 1:50pm
Lewis and Clark
Portland, OR
Friday, March 10, 1pm
Portland State University
Portland, OR
Wednesday, March 8, 5:30pm
Moving Encounters and the Limits of Vision in the Strasbourg South Transept: The Pillar of Angels as a Tool for Thinking
University of Oregon
Lawrence Hall, Room 177
1190 Franklin Boulevard
Eugene, OR
Long mediated by a few highly artificial photographs made in the 1920s, the monumental Pillar of Angels (a.k.a. Pillar of Judgment) in the thirteenth-century south transept of Strasbourg Cathedral has come to be understood as a fairly straightforward, if singular, example of Gothic religious art -- a transposition of conventional Last Judgment imagery, rendered in a transitional (late Romanesque-early Gothic) style, into the heart of sacred space. Encounters with the work from natural standpoints on the ground -- including the many "hotspots" of liturgical and judicial action within and beyond the transept -- yield entirely different perspectives. Drawing together the various impressions this multi-sided monument presents within its original spatial context, considering the associations it summons up with other works of sculpture known to contemporaries, and teasing out its analogies with the stained glass imagery that alternately illuminates and obscures it, this lecture offers a new understanding of the pillar as a work whose form and iconography alike are far more complex and wide-ranging than previous scholarship has recognized. The pillar emerges not only as a support for iconography but as a tool for thinking about the relations between humanity and the divine.
Local organizer: Maile Hutterer
Thursday, March 9, 1:50pm
Compassion as Moral Virtue: The Wise and Foolish Virgins in Gothic Sculpture
Lewis and Clark
Fields Art Center 207
Portland, OR
In the middle of the thirteenth century, the Wise and Foolish Virgins stepped from a marginal place into the physical and conceptual center of some major ecclesiastical portal programs. This move, which gave a privileged place to fictive characters in a spoken parable rather than to holy heroes of sacred history, was important not only iconographically; it also entailed a new valorization of emotional expressivity in the representation of bodies and faces, and gave to beholders a new kind of participatory power as they moved into sacred space. Focusing on the major programs at the cathedrals of Magdeburg and Strasbourg, and drawing on theological and dramatic literature from the time, this paper explores the novel ways in which expressive features were mobilized in sculpture to prompt diverse kinds of responses in beholders. Whereas some programs encouraged viewers to make clear moral judgments on the unprepared and ill-behaved Foolish Virgins, others placed them in an ambivalent position, withholding information about the Virgins' moral condition in favor of highlighting their emotional reactions to being excluded from heaven. By prompting feelings of compassion -- vicarious participation in the suffering of others -- the sculptures helped beholders replenish their own reserves of spiritual oil so as to make a worthy entrance into the symbolic heaven of the church.
Local organizer: Benjamin David
Friday, March 10, 1pm
The Work of Gothic Sculpture in the Age of Photographic Reproduction
Portland State University
Art Building, Room 200
2000 SW 5th Avenue
Portland, OR
This paper explores the convergence and interrelation of three major vectors between around 1914 and 1945: the World Wars in Europe (with their attendant nationalistic polemics, particularly in Germany), the flourishing of art history as a field of study, and the increased accessibility of works of art through photographic reproduction. The images that shaped people's views of Gothic architecture and sculpture both during and long after the wars were produced in a heady climate of nationalist conflict, which reverberates, often unnoticed today, through the pictorial compositions. I look in particular at the work of Richard Hamann, an eminent professor and the founder of the Marburg Image Index, who made some of the most spectacular and influential photos of Gothic cathedrals during a government-sponsored photo campaign in Occupied France in 1940, and at that of the portrait photographer Walter Hege, whose intimate, romanticizing photographs at Bamberg and Naumburg made the Gothic sculptures there into emblems of Germanic identity. Having shown the ways in which these photographers taught generations of viewers to see these works of art, I offer some new views of the major monuments (at Reims, Naumburg, and Strasbourg), in hopes of showing how a departure from the canonical photos can open up new perspectives on the sculptures both literally and conceptually. In content and mode of presentation, my paper offers reflections on the role of visual media in shaping our perceptions of artworks that are at once distant and very much present.
Local organizer: Anne McClanan