Faculty News
A Cultural History of Love in the Middle Ages arrives just in time for Valentine's Day! Co-edited by Barbara H. Rosenwein, prof. Gertsman's co-author on The Middle Ages in 50 Objects, it features prof. Gertsman's article, "Love in Art and Material Culture" that includes several Cleveland Museum of Art...
12:00 pm | Clark Hall Room 206, 11130 Bellflower Road
Embodiment of paradoxes and prophecies, fragmented by metaphors, the heterogeneous, ever-shifting artifact that is the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, could hardly stand further from the natural world. Late antique and Byzantine authors described her womb was the bush that burns and is not consumed, her body as the throne and the altar of God, and her arms as the liturgical spoon. She is a virgin who lactates. Despite her extraordinary qualities, remote from the experiences of womankind, art historians who have attempted to interpret this last facet of a very complex subject – the nursing Virgin Mary – have commonly essentialized it by presenting modern western constructions of nursing and motherhood as ahistorical, self-evident truths that are realized in this image-type. While scholars in many fields have explored the implications of gender theory for well over two decades, little of this work has been directed at Byzantine, and none at Egyptian Christian, art history. The vast distance that separates women engaging in the biologically natural act of nursing from the social construction of a nursing female cult figure shrinks and even disappears in their writings. Elizabeth Bowman, Elsie B. Smith Professor in the Liberal Arts, was motivated by this historiographic pattern and uses this iconographic type as a vehicle for exploring the variability of assemblages of the Virgin Mary Galaktotrophousa, or ‘she who nourishes with milk,’ and her diverse audiences.
An informal lunch will be provided.
Registration is requested. Register HERE.
We look forward to seeing you at another curatorial walk-through of the Creation and (Re)Birth exhibition with Prof. Elina Gertsman, Dr. Gerhard Lutz, and Dr. Sonya Rhie Mace on January 22 at 1 o'clock. Please meet in Gallery 115. Link to the exhibition description here.
We were delighted to host the curatorial talk for the Creation and (Re)Birth Exhibition on November 14 to a full house! Co-curators Prof. Elina Gertsman and Dr. Gerhard Lutz talked about the concept of the exhibition and then focused on specific objects, with the all-important participation from Dr. Sonya Rhee Mace and three PhD students — Zoe Appleby, Rebekkah Hart, and Cecily Hughes. The repeat of the event, this time for the university audience, will take place on January 22.
Please join us for the 50th Annual Cleveland Symposium, Moments, Intervals, Epochs: Time in the Visual Arts. This year’s symposium will take place at the Cleveland Museum of Art Lecture Hall on Friday and Saturday, November 22-23, 2024! Both as a physical dimension and a subjective...
Save the date for a two-day symposium titled Tracing Jewish Histories: The Afterlives of Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts, Judaica, and Architecture! Co-organized by Reed O’Mara and Laura Feigen, this symposium will take place in London at The Courtauld Institute of Art on May 19th and 20th. It will include scholars...
What divides the animal and the human? Do animals form families? What do images of animals in Hebrew manuscripts signify? Consider these questions and more in this episode of the Multicultural Middle Ages Podcast, sponsored by the Medieval Academy of America and produced by Jonathan Correa-Reyes, Logan Quigley, Will Beattie, Reed O’Mara, and Loren Lee. This episode features Elina Gertsman, David Shyovitz, Julie A. Harris, Sara Offenberg, and Beth Berkowitz in conversation with Reed. Click on the link to hear the episode on the Multicultural Middle Ages website or click here for the direct link on the podcast’s RSS feed.
The joint program’s exciting projects have been highlighted in the museum’s members’ magazine. Read more here on the current and upcoming exhibitions and the Mellon short-term fellows program!
We are delighted to announce that the exhibition on Creation and (Re)Birth in the Global Middle Ages just opened at the Cleveland Museum of Art. This ambitious show pulls together objects from several museum collections to explore some of the fundamental moments in the sacred narratives of the medieval world. The exhibition, co-curated by Professor Elina Gertsman and Dr. Gerhard Lutz, is a culmination of several years of collaboration between the department’s medieval art program and the CMA, made possible by the support of the Mellon Foundation. Graduate students contributed to wall text, object labels, and the gallery guide. For more on the show, featured already in Cleveland Art Events and This is Cleveland, please see here.
Congratulations to Professor Henry Adams, who just published a new book on the architecture and travel drawings of his older brother, Douglas Adams. Additionally, be on the lookout for his recent article in the American Art Review on the Wyoming artist Harry Jackson, who at various times was a...
The new issue of Perspective, published by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (Paris), features a debate on the subject, conducted by Claudine Cohen, Brigitte Derlon, Elina Gertsman, Monique Jeudy-Ballini, and Itay Sapir, and led by Thomas Golsenne. Scholars of prehistoric, medieval, early modern, and contemporary art discuss several questions: should we consider art’s autonomy if not illusory, then at least relatively so? When have we started understanding and referring to images and objects as works of art? What are the critiques of this nomination? What are the advantages and disadvantages of speaking about “art” or “a work of art” in different fields of art history? Is art-making always political? What about art criticism?
Read the debate here.