Slade Lectures Hilary Term 2025
'Gaps' - Slade Lecture Series 2025, presented by Professor Beate Fricke
The Hilary term Slade lectures have now taken place, and were presented by Professor Beate Fricke as our 24/25 Slade Professor of Fine Art.
Gaps
In writing history, the things that we do not know rarely play a starring role. These gaps in documentation about the past – blank spots in the material record and the archival apparatus – might all too easily be taken as indexes of moments in which nothing much happened. But from another perspective they are the sea surrounding what are truly infinitesimal islands of knowledge or the connective tissue that forms the basis for historical arguments about the fragmented forms of the past. These lectures attempt to recast the gap in this way, reframing assumptions and speculation as the normative condition of history writing rather than its aberration. And it seeks to expand from historical and historiographic notions of the gap to see the chasm, separation, schism, absence, and void within the objects of the past that we study and as central to their visual and material operations.
Lecture Recordings
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1. Gaps in Writing by Professor Beate Fricke
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.
2. Gaps in Archives by Professor Beate Fricke
Archival documents do not always record and represent significant parts of past societies. The buildings of the Loge du Mer at Perpignan, the Lonja in Palma and the Lonja de la Seda in Valencia reveal how the construction of market halls and municipal organisations supporting trade can provide insights into the underrepresented histories of Muslims, enslaved people, or labourers. These presences are largely absent from archival records – but do emerge as significant elements in a painted panel for the Loge du Mer (1479). As a way to make sense of this apparent dissonance, this lecture unspools the material quality of the silk traded in these halls. A new reading of the architectural structures of the Lonjas through the lens of the material world of the cloth they contained leads to a reading of the markets’ spiral columns as spines supporting a different history. Shifting the narrative from the mastery of an architect towards the collectives involved in winding the threads of silk histories furnishes a new view of these innovative municipal buildings.
3. Gaps in Images by Professor Beate Fricke
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.
4. Gaps in Space by Professor Beate Fricke
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.
5. Gaps in Origins by Professor Beate Fricke
How has life begun, how was the world created, and what lied at the origin of the creation? Human procreation, especially the origin of life, was frequently the subject of speculation and analysis in medieval thought. Drawings of the uterus accompanied and supported these reflections about the development of life in female bodies. These were made by anonymous draughtsmen and illustrators of medieval manuscripts as well as known scholars and artists like Hildegard von Bingen, Opicinus di Canistris, Jerome Bosch, and Leonardo da Vinci. Analysing the thoughts embedded into these images illuminates the creativity of such connections between divine creation, human procreation and artistic creativity ignited through an exploration of the unknown and the unseen.
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 ).
