Columbia – Seminar on Medieval Studies: Graeme Boone

Art historians and musicologists alike have long intuited a shared identity between late-medieval polyphony and flamboyant architectural design, but the nature and significance of this striking resemblance has never been seriously discussed. Close study of the surviving evidence demonstrates that identical constructive principles are at work in both arenas, suggesting the existence of a distinctive intellectual, aesthetic, and cultural turn on the eve of the Renaissance, the full recognition of which stands to transform the disciplines of late-medieval musicology and art history, and to anchor our understanding of fifteenth-century European mentalities in a broader and more inclusive way.