Materielle Welten – Der virtuelle Salon am IMAREAL
Material Worlds – The Virtual Salon at IMAREAL
Mittwoch, 28. Oktober 2026 | 17:00 Uhr (MEZ)
Wednesday, 28 October 2026 | 5 p.m (CET)
Metal and Parchment: Intermedial Entanglements
Joseph Salvatore Ackley (Wesleyan University, Middletown/Connecticut) & Shannon L. Wearing (Meadows Museum, Dallas/Texas)
The use of gold, silver, and other metals is a hallmark of medieval book decoration: indeed, it is the feature that technically makes a manuscript “illuminated.” The adamant materiality of these media, from dazzling golden surfaces to patches of silver blackened by oxidation, generates a fundamental tension between the raw presence of precious metal and its representational capacities. Gold and silver, applied as leaf or pigment, are thus semiotically complex materials, functioning as pictorial media while materially evoking metal things in the real world, from chalices to coins, and embodying wealth itself.
This lecture considers the intermedial entanglements that result from this foundational practice of medieval manuscript decoration. How might metal both disrupt and expand the significance of the manuscript image? How do manuscript depictions of chalices, reliquaries, and other metalworks, especially when rendered with gold and silver, complicate the virtual space of the image? And how might we move toward a fuller, more comprehensive appreciation of the multimedia manuscript image? Case studies will be drawn from deluxe examples of book painting across the Latin West, from the Carolingian period to the thirteenth century.
Vortragssprache/Language: English
Joseph Salvatore Ackley is associate professor of art history at Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut). His research focuses on gold and precious metalwork, and his current book project is titled Medieval Gold: Radiance and Weight. With Shannon L. Wearing he co-edited Illuminating Metalwork: Metal, Object, and Image in Medieval Manuscripts (De Gruyter, 2022), a fifteen-essay volume exploring the use of metallic media in medieval manuscript decoration and the depiction therein of precious metalwork. His broader research interests include precious-metal figurative sculpture and the historiography of the decorative arts.
Shannon L. Wearing is Publications Manager and Curatorial Consultant for the Meadows Museum (Dallas, Texas). A specialist in Iberian manuscripts, she has published on twelfth-century illuminated cartularies; illustrated charters as strategies of falsification; and networks of royal manuscript patronage between Paris and Seville. In addition to collaborating with Joseph Ackley on Illuminating Metalwork, she is the co-editor (with Amanda W. Dotseth) of Collective Display: Medieval Objects Out of Isolation (Brepols, forthcoming). She is presently preparing a book manuscript on royal artistic patronage and courtly culture in twelfth-century Barcelona.
The lecture will take place online via Teams. Please use the registration form below. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us via sekretariat.imareal@plus.ac.at.
Read more about the lecture series in this blog post (English version).