The Philosophy and Art History Research Seminar meets weekly in term on Thursday afternoons to discuss a paper by a visiting philosopher, art historian, or a member of our academic staff.

This talk explores relations between non-canonical miracle-working images and materiality. It questions what specific sculpted images in Florence, Venice and Bologna (c.1200–1400) reveal about notions of image-making, and how these are manifested in the material objects themselves and in legends surrounding their creation. How did ideas about their making and unmaking contribute to their status as devotional objects? The talk also considers how pre-modern religious sculpture, increasingly approached by scholars in relation to their multi-sensory appeal, might link to broader concerns in art history, enriching discussions on the non-finito, violence and renewal, and ideas about the origins of art.

Biography

Jessica N. Richardson is Lecturer in Early Modern Art in the Department of History of Art at the University of York. She has held positions at CASVA, Villa I Tatti, and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. Her publications include the books Remembering the Middle Ages in Early Modern Italy (2015, with Lorenzo Pericolo), The Aesthetics of Marble (2021, with Dario Gamboni and Gerhard Wolf) and the special issue of RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics titled Fashioned from Holy Matter 75/76 (spring/autumn 2021, with Annette Hoffmann). She is currently completing a monograph on the prehistory and making of miraculous images in Bologna, c.1100 to 1650.

If you would like to join via Zoom, please email Marcus Buchanen at spahpg@essex.ac.uk for the Zoom link.