Slade Lectures 2025

Distant places, visited by travellers, pilgrims and merchants, were included in paintings and drawings from the late medieval and early modern eras. These pictures, such as the Panorama from Scherzligen (1469) or the painting from the crypt in Bethlehem commissioned by four pilgrims to the Holy Land in 1520, provide images of regions of the world which could, for the most part, only have been imagined by their beholders. Late medieval paintings and accounts thereby bridge gaps in space and also reveal the creative potential of imaginations about distant, foreign, or imagined worlds.