Historiography (in Art History)

Dorothy Glass’s 2005 paper, “Quo Vadis? L’étude de la sculpture romane italienne à l’aube du troisiéme millénaire,” balanced a brief sketch of the historiography of medieval Italian sculpture studies as practiced during the last millennium with suggestions for directions such studies might take in the new one. Many of the issues and approaches she signaled as potentially fruitful have since been integrated into scholarship: for instance, the paired study of iconography and liturgy has led to a richer understanding of the social and ritual functions of religious sculpture, including its role in the creation of sacred space, while investigations of patronage have highlighted, in particular, the role of the laity in the development of medieval Italian art. But as scholars know only too well, history has a way of tracing its own course, and the intervening fifteen years have brought dramatic changes to medieval art history unanticipated by Glass’s essay, including the environmental, ethical, material, and Mediterranean “turns,” new digital (or digitally inspired) tools and methods, and the emergence of long-suppressed questions of racism and bias, historiography, and the academy. This triple session seeks to honor Glass’s many years of contributions to medieval art history by asking, Quo vadimus nunc? We present papers that engage methodologically, historiographically, prescriptively, and even polemically with the study of medieval Italian sculpture today, expansively defined.

The workshop aims to explore how Byzantine art history has developed at a key moment in European history, during the 1920s and the 1930s, focusing on the individual stories of Byzantine art historians in that period.
The workshop intends to explore the theoretical and methodological innovations which emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, and how the latter intertwined with the geopolitical and cultural context of that time. We especially seek short papers deepening the biography of pivotal scholars of Byzantine art and to compare how they approached the discipline in different contexts, such as in Western and Central Europe, in the United States, and in the USSR.