Slade Lectures 2025

Pictures can expose gaps in representations. Painters sometimes playfully use these gaps to bridge and reveal ideas about what we cannot see. Gaps can offer a space for imagination, encouraging the viewer to create mental images and ignite pictorial innovations. Hell, purgatory, heaven, and life on earth (as well as in between these temporalities) are sometimes all represented in one picture, e.g. in the Coronation of the Virgin by Enguerrand Quarton (1453) or the Triptych of St. John the Baptist and John the Evangelist by Hans Memling (1479). Presenting these disparate temporalities in one space relies, in these works, on gaps. Images related to realms in the mind of the beholder of these pictures may close such gaps through imagination or expand them with thoughts and reflections. The surviving contracts and documents between patrons and painters are very explicit, yet they remain curiously silent regarding aspects of representation. Digging deeper into another kind of gaps, those linking images, imagination, and representational systems, will allow us to understand how late medieval painters paved the ground towards the early modern era.

 

 

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).