Past Event: Sacred Intermediality: Embedded Devotional Objects in Medieval Murals: ISM Fellows Lunch Talk with Alexis Wang

During the High Middle Ages, a new artistic practice arose that challenged the boundaries of visual media: artisans and patrons increasingly inserted portable devotional objects such as relics and painted panels into the immobile frescoes, mosaics, and architectural sculpture that adorned churches across Latin Europe and the Byzantine East. Yet despite its widespread application—found even in the renowned Arena Chapel in Padua—the tradition has never been systematically studied. In this talk, I offer an introduction to this intermedial practice with a particular focus on the exemplary case of the twelfth-century apse of Santa Restituta in Naples. Picturing a monumental figure of Christ in majesty, the frescoed apse incorporates a wooden panel for the face of Christ. I examine the simultaneity of the apse’s intermedial parts in light of contemporary enshrinement strategies for privileged images and twelfth-century debates involving the mutability of form. Considered together with the devotional concerns of medieval viewers, the mixing of different media had powerful theological consequences. It registers an understanding of the wall surface as a charged site for mediating—and containing—the divine.

This event is free, but registration is required. Lunch will be provided.

Open to Yale Community only.

Contact: Katya Vetrov

Speaker Bio:

Alexis Wang is assistant professor of art history at Binghamton University. She earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University, specializing in the visual and material cultures of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Her current research focuses on issues of materiality, cross-cultural exchange, and the intersections of art, science, and devotion in the medieval world. During her fellowship year, she will continue work on her book project, The Embedded Object: Intermedial Surfaces in Medieval Mural Decoration, which is the first comprehensive study of the practice of embedding devotional objects, such as relics and painted panels, into monumental mural images in medieval Italian churches. Eliding the traditional divisions of icon and narrative, portable and monumental, and Byzantine and Western, embedding was a widespread yet little studied practice from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, found even in some of the most well-known monuments of Italian medieval art. Examining the real and legendary origins of embedded objects, this project contends that the setting of relics and painted panels into murals invites a broader rethinking of artistic production in the medieval Mediterranean, one that considers how a transcultural and transmedial awareness impacted the status of an image. Wang’s research has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome.