As friends and colleagues around the world prepare to celebrate festivals of light, we at the Index wish you all a luminous holiday season and a peaceful, fulfilling New Year.
This year we’re inspired by the global interest in Index resources, which has grown considerably since we ended our yearly database subscription fees in 2023. Our last online database training session saw individual registrations from more than ten different countries, including Australia, Greece, Spain, Ireland, the UK, Italy, China, and Canada. Interchange with this wide network has been a highlight for us.
In 2024, we also offered online database tutorials, hosted classroom visits, and fielded more than one hundred research questions in person and online. Such interaction is at the core of the Index’s long history as a research tool and hub for scholarship in medieval art history. We here offer a selection of the highly varied questions asked of the Index in 2024:
Please continue to stay in touch. Follow us on Facebook and Bluesky; use our Research Inquiries form; and watch our blog for new events in 2025. Next year’s happenings include an online database training session, an Index Wintersession class on writing alternative text for images, the conference session “Breaking the Mirror” at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, and a fall conference on “Art and Proof in the Ninth Century.” We look forward to sharing these events with you and to supporting your research for many years to come!
Free registration is now open for on-site attendance at the Index conference “Unruly Iconography?” In it, eight speakers from a variety of fields will open new conversation about medieval images that don’t follow the rules, challenging their listeners to rethink the unspoken paradigms that have decided when iconographic motifs should be considered canonical and which are instead “singular,” “exceptional,” or even “mistakes.” They will interrogate the value and limitations of the unspoken binaries that often underlie such labels: tradition versus invention, canon versus exception, or center versus periphery. Their wide-ranging papers will demonstrate the value of a more critically aware, contextually sensitive, and historically informed approach to the study of images and image-making in the Middle Ages.
The conference will take place on November 9, 2024 in the Louis A. Simpson Building, A71, at Princeton University. Although the conference will not be recorded, a live stream link will provide digital access to those who cannot attend in person. Those planning to attend on site are asked to register to ensure adequate seating and refreshments.
Please find the full conference schedule and registration link here. We look forward to seeing you!
Many people know the name of Belle da Costa Greene, if not also her story as the fledgling librarian who rose to become librarian and then director of the famous Morgan Library & Museum in New York (1905–1948). A major exhibition opening this fall at the Morgan will explore the broad scope of Greene’s life and career, including the challenges she faced as a young woman of African-American heritage who lived as white in a field dominated by powerful European and American men. But where did Greene acquire the training in languages, history, and rare book studies that would advance her career? With the support of the Princeton Histories Fund, a team of researchers from Princeton University Library and the Index of Medieval Art set out to learn more. Their findings include the discovery of Greene’s hand in library records, a letter pinpointing the beginning of her work with the Morgan in summer 1905, and a fascinating correspondence documenting her continuing professional relationship with Princeton faculty and staff after her departure for New York.
These findings will be highlighted in a mini-exhibition opening on November 12, 2024 at Firestone Library and beginning with a round table discussing the project’s findings and their ramifications for Greene’s biography and the history of librarianship. Featured participants will include Kathleen Brennan of Princeton’s Mudd Library; Erica Ciallela of the Morgan Library & Museum and Schlesinger Library, Harvard University; and Mireille Djenno of Firestone Special Collections. The round table will be held at 4:30 pm on Nov. 12 in the Chancellor Green Rotunda, the very building in which the university’s library was housed during Greene’s time at Princeton. It will be followed by a reception and viewing in Firestone Library. Both round table and exhibition, supported by the Princeton Histories Fund, are free and open to the public.
The Index of Medieval Art is delighted to share a call for participation in a field seminar hosted by the Center for the Art and Architectural History of Port Cities “La Capraia” at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples on 12-13 June 2025. Associated with the conference “Unruly Iconography?”, which will be hosted on 9 November 2024 at the Index of Medieval Art, “Unruly Iconographies / Iconografie Indisciplinate” will take medieval Naples and southern Italy as a laboratory for exploring relationships between iconography and place within a geographically expanded Middle Ages.
The seminar organizers welcome proposals that consider individual case studies from medieval Naples and southern Italy as points of departure for investigating questions including so-called exceptions, hapaxes, mistakes, and lost originals; dynamics between “center” and “periphery”; challenges of chronology and dating in so-called peripheries and border zones; circulations of iconographies through polycentric cultural networks; translations of motifs across mediums, formats, functional contexts, and audiences; the legibility and illegibility of iconographies across cultures; mechanisms of transfer including mobile artworks, artists, and patrons; interplays between royal, non-royal elite, and non-elite patronage; and the limitations of previous models of iconography when confronted with cases in medieval Naples and southern Italy. They welcome in particular proposals that locate southern Italy within broader Mediterranean worlds, at the convergence of multiple cultural and religious currents including Latin and Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
Further details and a compete call for papers are found here.
The Index of Medieval Art will sponsor the session “Breaking the Mirror: New Approaches to the Study of Medieval Images” at the 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.
Everyone wants something from medieval images: a sense of story, a corroborated argument, a witness to medieval realities. Although the methods by which scholars seek these answers have evolved considerably, their work remains dominated by the conception of the medieval image as mirror, one that reflects either explicitly or indirectly the truths of the historical past. This session challenges this tendency by asking what we can really expect to learn from medieval images. How does their potential to go beyond illustration—to aspire, deceive, and even fantasize—complicate what and how scholars can learn from them?
We invite papers from researchers at all levels and especially encourage submissions from early-career scholars. The session’s hybrid format can accommodate up to two remote participants. Conference details and a full call for papers can be found at this link.
“Unruly Iconography?” opens a new conversation about medieval images that don’t follow the rules. Its eight speakers will challenge their listeners to rethink the unspoken paradigms that have decided when iconographic motifs should be considered canonical and which are instead “singular,” “exceptional,” or even “mistakes.” They will interrogate the value and limitations of the unspoken binaries that often underlie such labels: tradition versus invention, canon versus exception, or center versus periphery. Their wide-ranging papers will demonstrate the value of a more critically aware, contextually sensitive, and historically informed approach to the study of images and image-making in the Middle Ages.
“Unruly Iconographies?” will take place on November 9, 2024 and constitutes the first of two internationally linked conferences, the second of which will be a site-based seminar at the Center for the Art and Architectural History of Port Cities “La Capraia” in Naples in June 2025, which makes southern Italy a laboratory for exploring the relationships between iconography and place within a geographically expanded Middle Ages.
Speakers for the conference are listed alphabetically below. A schedule and free registration link will be shared on this page in September 2024.
Diliana Angelova (UC Berkeley), “Lawless, Hilarious, Black: Eros and Companions in Byzantium.”
Alexander Brey (Wellesley College), “Iconography Between Empires: The Red Hall at Varakhsha.”
Heidi Gearhart (George Mason University), “A Poem, a Scribe, a Saint, and a Scriptorium: Evoking Multiple Presences in Arras Bibliothèque Municipale MS 860.”
Julie A. Harris (Independent Scholar, Chicago), “Indicate, Illustrate, Decorate, or Comment? Iberian Hebrew Bibles and Their Unruly Paratextual Marks.”
Krisztina Ilko (University of Cambridge), “The Chessmen of the Hunt.”
Nicole C. Paxton (John Cabot University), “Iconographic Innovation and Political Subversion in the Medieval Serbian Akathistos Cycle.”
Patricia Simons (University of Michigan/University of Melbourne), “The Goldfinch: Flights of Fancy.”
Mark H. Summers (University of Arkansas), “Dressed to Impress: Reconsidering Roger II of Sicily and the Iconography of Kingship.”
Modern study of medieval iconography inevitably entails grappling with exceptions and the rupture of expectations. No sooner might scholars settle on an expected visual formula—Cain killing Abel with his farmer’s hoe, Saint George riding his snowy steed—than we’re pulled up by an image that flouts those rules. In the fifteenth-century Alba Bible, Cain sinks his teeth directly into his brother’s neck, arguably in reference to Jewish exegesis, while in some Byzantine and post-Byzantine icons of St. George, a small boy carrying a cup rides with the saint, inspiring a semi-serious modern tradition concerning George’s love of coffee. Other iconographic traditions seem to emerge out of the blue, as did the distinctive type known as the Virgin of Humility, which flowered suddenly in Mediterranean cities in the 1340s. Such unruly iconographies both intrigue and disappoint us: they engage yet disobey our expectations, and we are left to wonder why.
The culprit in such cases is less often a rogue medieval work of art than the rigidity of modern scholarship. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, the assumption that medieval iconographic norms were formulaic, authoritative, and above all universally obeyed still shapes the way modern scholars analyze the imagery they study. Even after the poststructuralist turn, art historians have continued to wrestle with expectations deeply embedded in the discipline: that medieval artists preferred to copy or turn to text rather than to innovate; that unprecedented iconography must be based on a lost original; that patrons or learned advisors must have directed artists’ work; that traditions translated smoothly across media, formats, and contexts; that all viewers read and understood the images they saw in the same way. Underlying many of these assumptions has been a wider one: that the ideas of greatest value must be tracked to artists rooted in cosmopolitan centers, rather than to artists and works of art that circulated freely throughout their peripheries.
The conference “Unruly Iconographies? Examining the Unexpected in Medieval Art” aims to open a new conversation about medieval images that don’t follow the rules. We call for papers, drawn from any area of the medieval world broadly defined, that ask both speakers and audience to rethink the unspoken paradigms that have decided which iconographic motifs are canonical and which are “singular,” “exceptional,” or even “mistakes.” At the broadest level, we seek to problematize the binaries on which these paradigms were founded: tradition versus invention, canon versus exception, and center versus periphery. At a more specific one, we invite deeply researched case studies whose particularities can lead scholars to a more effective, contextually sensitive, and historically informed approach to the study of images and image-making in the Middle Ages.
“Unruly Iconographies?” will take place on November 9, 2024 at the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University, following the Weitzmann Lecture by Dr. Brigitte Buettner, held on November 8 and hosted by Princeton’s Department of Art & Archaeology. It also will constitute the first of two internationally linked events, the second of which will be a site-based seminar at the Center for the Art and Architectural History of Port Cities “La Capraia” in Naples in June 2025. Whereas the Index conference will consider broadly disciplinary questions about methodology, theory, and models, the Naples conference, hoped to be the first of several site-based conferences of this kind, takes southern Italy as a laboratory for exploring the relationships between iconography and place within a geographically expanded Middle Ages, focusing on the potentials and limits of the study of iconography in southern Italy. Details about this conference will be available in Summer 2024.
Submissions for the Princeton-based conference are invited by April 1, 2024. They should include a one-page abstract and c.v. and be sent to fionab@princeton.edu. Travel and hotel costs for the eight selected speakers will be covered by the Index. Speakers will be informed of their selection no later than May 1, 2024.
The Index is pleased to serve as site host for “The Medieval Multiple,” a conference organized by Sonja Drimmer (University of Massachusetts Amherst) and Ryan Eisenman (University of Pennsylvania), with support from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the International Center of Medieval Art, the University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Humanities and Fine Arts, Professor James Marrow and Dr. Emily Rose, and the Princeton University Department of Art & Archaeology. The conference will be held both in person and online.
Recent efforts to conceptualize the “pre-modern multiple” only occasionally reckon with the Middle Ages. Medieval multiples are frequently positioned against their modern counterparts—especially print—and subsequently presented as isolated, unrealized forms of mass (re)production. Yet the multiple was not an anomaly but rather the product of a common mode of artistic creation in the Middle Ages, found in a wide variety of materials and object types. Recognizing its ubiquity in visual and material culture, this conference brings together scholars to consider the multiple in the interconnected cultures of Afro-Eurasia between ca. 500 and 1500: its ontological status, the ways in which it could be produced, and how its makers and viewers recognized (or failed to recognize) replication.
For speakers and schedule and to register, please follow this link.
As many of the world’s traditions celebrate the returning light and the promise of new growth, the staff of the Index of Medieval Art wish all our researchers and friends a bright and peaceful winter break.
Our office and reading room will be closed Dec. 26 & 27, 2023, and Jan. 1 & 2, 2024.
By Henry Schilb, Art History Specialist
Is it lost? Was it destroyed? Did it ever really exist at all?
These are questions that we Indexers have to ponder all too often. We try to be both accurate and thorough in our descriptions of the objects in the database, but sometimes we get stumped. Although we Indexers understand that the database we’re building is an invaluable resource—that’s why we do what we do, after all, and we try to do it well—we also understand that there is room for improvement. The Index is neither complete nor perfect. There are gaps and errors in our data, and we know it.
But here’s the thing. In July 2023 the Index of Medieval Art was very pleased to announce that a paid subscription is no longer required for access to the Index database, a change made possible by a generous grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the support of the Index’s parent department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. And now, to celebrate this change, we want to hear from you! Specifically, we want you to tell us what we’ve got wrong. Now that the Index is open to anyone with access to the internet, you can help us correct a mistake, if you find one, or fill in a lacuna in one of our records. It has always been important that we hear from all who use the Index, especially those who know things that we don’t, so what are you waiting for? You can use our Feedback form, or you can also contact one of the Research Staff directly.
Strange as it may seem, one of the most challenging pieces of information to verify is the present whereabouts of an object. As we catalog our oldest records, we sometimes run across works of art that we simply aren’t able to locate. An object’s location is the type of data that can change over time: things get lost; things get sold; things get stolen. When we just don’t know where something is, we indicate this by giving “Unknown” as the current location. You’ll find hundreds of examples in the Index. When possible we include a “Last Known Location,” the place where an item was last known to exist. A “Last Known Location” can apply to items that we know to have been destroyed, but it also applies frequently to items that are lost or in unidentified, private collections. Although the Index can sometimes discover an object’s current location, that bit of data often eludes us.
So, we’re asking for your help. Here are a few examples:
Can you help us find the piece of gold glass in figure 1? This is the only image we have, an illustration from a nineteenth-century publication. This piece is cataloged as Index system number jkg20200423001, and we have reason to hope that we’ll be able to find this one eventually. You see, a similar piece from the same collection—and illustrated in that same publication—is now in the MFA Boston (MFA accession number 1974.483 and Index system number hds20230131002).
An ivory diptych cataloged as Index system number hds20230620001 presents a similar problem (fig. 2). One wing is now in the Museum Mayer van den Bergh in Antwerp, but the location of the other wing is still unknown. Even the more specialized Gothic Ivories Project at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London lists the location of the left wing as unknown, so it’s not just us. Knowing the location of only one wing of a diptych can be frustrating, but we cling to our hope that we’ll eventually discover the present whereabouts of the other wing.
A more extreme example is cataloged as Index system number hds20230712001, an object formerly in the Rumyantsev Museum, Moscow. All the information we have comes from a nineteenth-century publication [Linas, Charles de, “L’Histoire du Travail a l’Exposition Universelle de 1867,” Revue de l’art chrétien 11 (1867): 344–45]. We have no other leads or clues. We don’t even have a photograph or a drawing to go on! Does it still exist? Is it a phantom? Can you help us find it?
Some of these items may still be in private collections; others may have been destroyed at some point after they were first entered into the Index of Medieval Art card catalog; but others may be sitting in storage in some museum in Oz, or Narnia, or even New Jersey, just waiting for you to point us in their direction. Could that be the case for the little chess piece entered in the database as Index system number hds20230330001 (fig. 3)? Formerly in a private collection in Paris, its current location is unknown to us. Is it in Peoria now? Or Paducah? Or even right here in Princeton? If you know the answers to any of these questions—or if you see other gaps that you might be able to help us fill—please tell us! With your help, piece by piece, we’ll make the Index of Medieval Art as accurate, thorough, and up to date as it possibly can be.
