Date/Time
Date(s) - 20 Oct 2016
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Location
Bettman Lecture Hall, 612 Schermerhorn, Columbia University
Category(ies) No Categories
Please join us next Thursday, October 20, for our first talk in this year’s Robert Branner Forum for Medieval Art:
“The Matter of Nothing”
Elina Gertsman (Case Western Reserve University)
Thursday, October 20, 6:30 p.m.
612 Schermerhorn Hall, Columbia University
This talk will consider late medieval empty space as a theoretical object. Often defined by its allegedly omnipresent horror vacui, medieval imagery, in fact, had a complex relationship with the concept(s) of nothingness. Vacant – and vacated – loci are many and multifarious in the visual culture of medieval Europe, and they invade its material universe persistently and exultantly. I will focus on the manuscript page and explore its generative absences, contextualizing them within discourses on imagination, natural philosophy, mathematics, and theology. Presented as if exposed, exhibited, or revealed, emptiness functions as a footprint – visual, cognitive, material – of its makers and beholders, of their viewing practices, and of their sensorium.
The event is free and open to the public. Reception to follow.