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.

 

 

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).