CIC is pleased to announce a seminar “Critical Making: Knowledge and Art in the Early Modern Globe, c. 1400–1660,” a seminar for CIC faculty members in art history, the arts, and other disciplines, such as history and English, who incorporate art history in their courses. It will be especially valuable for those at institutions without large campus museums or proximity to major art museums.
The seminar will be held at Oberlin College's Allen Memorial Art Museum June 20-24, 2022. Oberlin College's Christina Neilson, associate professor of Renaissance and Baroque art history and chair of the art history department, Erik Inglis, professor of Medieval art history, and Heather Galloway, fellow of the American Institute of Conservation and founder of Galloway Art Conservation, will lead the seminar that will draw upon the museum's rich collections.
The seminar will approach artworks from the 15th through 17th century from the perspective of their materials and making, including both works produced in Europe, and those produced outside it but for European audiences. Participants will explore the significance of materials in a time, when, for instance, wood was equated to the human body and bronze compared to blood. Working with materials in workshops, laboratories and marketplaces, artisans developed hands-on experiences that paved the way for much of the “higher learning” of the Scientific Revolution. What did artists and viewers know and/or believe about the origins and properties of materials such as ivory, paint, and metal? How did the processes of making objects contribute to the meanings of works of art for their original audiences? The seminar will also consider: the appeal of the unfinished artwork; content thematised through materials and processes; material-specific qualities used to communicate beliefs about nature (such as painting in oil for skin); the value of imitating materials; objects made from mixed media techniques; original sites of display; and objects made across cultures. Pedagogical questions such as how to animate the classroom by addressing materiality and facture and how to find relevant works of art close at hand will also be discussed. The outstanding collections of the Allen Memorial Art Museum and the Mary Church Terrell library at Oberlin College will be the focus of many of these discussions, enriched by conversations with conservators and curators. The seminar will also visit the Cleveland Museum of Art. Participants will also discuss related pedagogical issues—how to animate the classroom by addressing materiality and facture and how to find relevant works of art close at hand.
CIC's seminars on Teaching European Art in Context are made possible with the generous support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
Seminar Leaders
Heather Galloway is a Fellow of the American Institute of Conservation and the founder of Galloway Art Conservation. Trained in the conservation of paintings and a specialist in modern and contemporary art, she has taught classes on the history of materials and techniques for the graduate program in art history at Case Western Reserve University and for Oberlin College, as well as teaching cleaning techniques for the University of Oslo’s department of archaeology, conservation, and history.
Erik Inglis is Mildred C. Jay Professor of Art History at Oberlin, teaching art in Europe and the Mediterranean from c. 0 to c. 1400. He is currently researching the medieval art historical imagination, that is, how medieval people understood the history of art and architecture despite the absence of a discipline of art history. His article on the 1534 inventory of the treasury of St. Denis (Art Bulletin, 2016) investigates the material expertise of monks and goldsmiths; he has also published on the medieval understanding of the history of technique. His earlier publications include Jean Fouquet and the Invention of France (Yale University Press, 2011) and Faces of Power and Piety (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008).
Christina Neilson is associate professor of Art History at Oberlin and chair of the department. Her research tackles the relationship between theory and practice, especially the meaning of materials and techniques, primarily in Europe but also in Latin America. Her book, Practice and Theory in the Italian Renaissance Workshop. Verrocchio and the Epistemology of Making Art (Cambridge University Press, 2019), explores the significance of processes of making in the oeuvre of the 15th-century Florentine artist Andrea del Verrocchio. She has also published articles on the meaning of wood in early modern European sculpture and on the concealment and revelation of knowledge in artists' workshops.