Slade Lectures 2025

Focusing on this notion of gaps in the constitution of cultural heritage, the first lecture pursues the traces of loot and objects of war. Close readings of illustrations in fifteenth-century military manuals, of drawings in the Bernese chronicle of Diebold Schilling (1478-1483) and of drawings and prints by the mercenary soldier Urs Graf uncover important aspects of the transformation of booty into cultural heritage. The traces of the history of two pairs of looted canons from the 15th and 16th centuries are riddled with gaps. Following these blank spots reveals, however, how these objects and their fragmented histories may be understood as contributing to the pre-history of museums and their collections in Switzerland.

 

 

Beate Fricke is Professor and Chair of European Medieval Art at the Institute of Art History at the University of Bern. Previously, she was professor for Medieval Art at the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the history of sculpture, image theory and the objects as archives of a history of applied arts, materiality, knowledge transfer and trade in the global "Middle Ages". Among her publications are Holy Smoke. Censers across Cultures, 2023, Fallen Idols, Risen Saints: Sainte Foy of Conquest and the Revival of Monumental Sculpture in Medieval Art, 2015, and together with Finbarr Barry Flood Tales things Tell. Material Histories of Early Globalisms, 2024. She is leading the research project The Inheritance of Looting. Medieval Trophies to Modern Museums (SNF – https://looting.ch). She is founder and Editor-in-chief of the journal 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual. Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und Visuellen Kultur (link: https://21-inquiries.eu/en).