Univ.-Prof. Assaf Pinkus, BA PhD

• Gotische Kunst im Deutschsprachigen Raum, Frankreich, Italien
• Modere christliche Kunst im Heiligen Land 1900-gegenwart.
• Kunst Erfahrung, Rezeption, und Somästhetik
• Bildtheorie
• Materialität und Medium

Kurzbiographie

Assaf Pinkus specializes in medieval figural arts, inquiring into questions of experience, spectatorship, and non-religious imaginative response to medieval imagery. My current theoretical concerns include questions of soma aesthetic, scale (relational sizing) and the formation of subjectivity.

My earlier work focused on problems of artistic production, workshop routine, and medieval mass-sculpture, exploring the political agendas animated in the religious imagery (Workshops and Patrons of St. Theobald in Thann, Waxmann, 2006). Following this, I embarked on a broader project dedicated to the Parler tympana at Augsburg, Freiburg, Schwäbisch Gmünd, Ulm, and Thann, concentrating on aspects of narrativity and spectatorship (Patrons and Narratives of the Parler School, Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009). In my symulachra project (Sculpting Simulacra in Medieval Germany, 1250–1380, Ashgate, 2014), I explored the potential of an intuitive, imaginative, non-religious response to late medieval art. My last study (Visual Aggression: Images of Martyrdom in Late Medieval Germany, Penn State University Press, 2020), engages with soma-aesthetics and bodily response to violence imagery and the history – visual, philological, theological, and cultural – of violence. I am also interested in Modern Christian Art in the Holy Land (Where the Word Became Flesh: The Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth Cologne: De Gruyter, 2020, and the creation of an imaginary New Holy Land within the “old” one. I am currently working on colossal imagery and the notion of “the Gigantic” in late medieval culture, exploring the role of “the Gigantic” in courtly poems and epics, Norse Edda, travel literature, cartography and geography (Giants in the Medieval City, Brepols, 2024). This project led to the coining of the “Scaling Turn”: an artistic, technological, and cultural manipulation of relational sizing that drastically altered the visual culture of the period, along with its theological and philosophical tenets.

Main Grants

Giants in the City: Colossal Sculpture in Late Medieval Gerany

Israel Science Foundation 553/19

From the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, the urban landscapes in the German speaking regions were shaped not only by their town halls and cathedral spires, by also by the colossal statues of the semi-historical, semi legendary figures of Giants.      The statues would have aroused in the contemporaneous viewers what I term as the “Colossus Imagination”:  namely, the cultural imagination that material (wood/stone), medium (colossal sculpture), topic (mighty giants), and expectations (living images) evoked in late medieval viewers. Through their size, the sculptures embodied legends and constructed memories of colossal statues of the ancient world and, at the same time, evoked the entire medieval epistemology related to the notion of “the Gigantic,” namely: superhuman creatures from foreign lands that were often associated with supernatural powers and magic. How were such memories communicated and transmitted through the motif of the giant?  What might be the agency of the giant as a motif that lies beyond iconography? Why would the “revival” of colossal sculptures have occurred north of the Alps and not in Italy, and why particularly in the German-speaking space? What function might the motif have had in human perception beyond its political message? Beyond geographical boundaries? Beyond time?

The Scaling Turn: Western Visual Culture 1300–1500

SCALET  Interdisciplinary Group

Late medieval art was obsessed with scaling: scaling sculptures of Roland and Mary up to colossi and down to miniature figurines; scaling up depictions of the cosmos to appear much larger than God and vice versa; miniaturizing architectural elements into micro-architectural structures on altarpieces and then magnifying them in monumental sacrament houses; shrinking sacred history to fit into prayer nuts; playing with multiple scales within shrine Madonnas; and oscillating between thumb-sized prayer books and gigantic display volumes. The preoccupation with scaling was contemporaneous with improvements to new measuring instruments and standards that could investigate celestial bodies; fix time, distance, space, or quantities; and classify human physiognomy. While measuring (using set units) and scaling ( a relative and relational act) were always a part of artistic cultural production, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they were in an unprecedented degree of constant flux and change, culminating in Alberti’s theories of proportion. SCALET aims to delineate and bring to the fore what is here define for the first time as the late medieval scaling turn—an artistic, technological, and cultural manipulation of relational sizing that occurred in the Latin West. Since artifacts are instrumental in communication and transmission of knowledge in almost all aspects of cultural life, both religious and secular, scaled objects became key players in the construction of the late medieval self. The project offers a new understanding of the ideological and cultural mechanism of scale in late medieval Europe and explore the decisive role of scaled artifacts as articulators of the shifting relationships between God, humanity, and the material world.

Monografien

Workshops and Patrons of St. Theobald in Thann. Münster, Berlin, New York: Waxmann Verlag, 2006.

Patrons and Narratives of the Parler School: The Marian Tympana, 1350-1400. Kunstwissenschaftliche Sudien Band 151. Berlin, München: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009.

Sculpting Simulacra in Medieval Germany, 1250-1380. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.

Visual Aggression: Images of Martyrdom in Late Medieval Germany. University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2020.

Giants in the Medieval City. Tunhout: Brepols, 2024.

A Global (Art)History of Giants (in progress).

Herausgeberschaften

Assaf Pinkus and Tamar Cholcman, eds., The Sides of the North, An Anthology in Honor of Professor Yona Pinson. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015.

Assaf Pinkus and Rivka Shusterman, New Sculptures on the Tel Aviv University Campus. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 2017.

Assaf Pinkus, Einat Segal, and Gil Fishhof, eds., Where the Word Became Flesh: The Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth. Cologne: De Gruyter, 2020.

Christine Beier, Tim Juckes, and Assaf Pinkus, eds., How Do Images Work? Tunhout: Brepols, 2022.

Akademischer Berater (academic advisor)

Mati Mayer, Medieval Art in Europe and Byzantium, 3 volumes. Open University, 2016 (Hebrew).

Belletristik

The Great Painting. Tel Aviv, Afik, 2023.

Aufsätze (Auswahl)

“Rudolf’s Journey: Art Patronage and Politics in the St. Theobald Minster in Thann,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 65 (2004), S. 273–88.

“The Patron Hidden in the Narrative: Eve and Johanna at St. Theobald in Thann,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 70/1 (2007), S. 23–54.

“The Parler School of Southwestern Germany: a Reconsideration of 14^th Century Workshops and Mass Sculpture,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft 61 (2007), S. 49–80.

“The Italian Connection: On the Origins of the Parler Art,” Assaph. Studies in Art History 12 (2008), S. 63–102.

Assaf Pinkus, “Voyeuristic Stimuli: Seeing and Hearing in Giotto's Painting,” Wiener Jahrbuch Für Kunstgeschichte LIX (2010), S. 7–26.

“The Womb and the Eye: Viewing the Shrine Madonna,” Arte Medievale IV/II (2012), S. 223–42.

“Visual Aggression: The Martyrs’ Cycle in Schwäbisch Gmünd,” Gesta 52/1 (2013), S. 43–59.

Assaf Pinkus, “The Founder Figures at Vienna Cathedral: Between Imago and Symulachrum,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschat 40 (2013), 63–92.  

“Imaginative Responses to Gothic Sculpture: the Bamberg Rider,” Viator 45/1 (2014), 331–60.

Assaf Pinkus and Michal Ozeri, “From Body to Icon: The Life of Sts. Peter and Paul in the Murals of S. Piero a S. Piero a Grado,” Convivium 2 (2014), S. 1–21.

“Lost in Symulachra: The Living Statues on the Imperial Balcony in Mühlhausen,” Neue Frankfurter Forschungen zur Kunst 16 (2015), S. 384–400.

“Transformations in Wood: Between Sculpture and Painting in Late Medieval Devotional Objects,” Viator 48, no. 3 (2017), S. 263–91.

“The Giant of Bremen: Roland and the “Colossus Imagination,” Speculum 93/2 (2018), S. 387–419.

 “ein rise starc unde grôz”: Temporalities of Salvation in St. Jakob in Kastelaz, Word & Image 35/4 (2019), S. 347-66.

“Verkörperte Imagination, imaginierte Körper: Die Martyrien des hl. Bartholomäus und der hl. Katharina in der rheinischen Kunst des Spätmittelalters,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft 72/73 (2019), S. 347–70.

“Experiencing the Gigantic in Late Medieval Art,” Codex Aquilarensis 37 (2022), S. 465 – 83.

Assaf Pinkus, Neta Bodner und Einat Segal, “A Holy Land within The Holy Land: Duc in Altum as a Case in Point,” Arts 12 (2023), S. 1–27.

Aufsätze in Sammelbände

“Johann Parler and the Thann Wrokshop: A Master and his Workshop?” in Arts and Crafts: Interrelations and Boundaries, eds. Nurith Kenaan-Kedar and Asher Ovadia. Tel-Aviv: TAU Press, 2003, S.105–26 (Hebrew).

“Gothic Symulachra: The Naumburger Stifterfiguren,” in Der Naumburger Meister – Bildhauer und Architekt im Europa der Kathedralen, vol. 3, ed. Guido Siebert. Petersberg: Imhof, 2013, S. 204–17.

“Guido da Sienna and the Four Modes of Violence,” in Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300-1650, eds. John Decker and Mitzi Kirkland-Ives. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014. S. 24–43.

“Seeing through the Schreinmadonna,” The Challenge of the Object / Die Herausforderung des Objekts, Congress Proceedings, T. 1-3, eds. Ulrich Großmann and Petra Krutisch. Nürnberg, 2014, S. 53–57.

“Transformative Werke: Materie, Farbe und Res spätmittelalterlicher Schnitzwerke am Mittelrhein,” in Frankfurt als Zentrum unter Zentren? Kunsttransfer und Formgenese am Mittelrhein 1400 – 1500, eds. Martin Büchsel, Hilja Droste, and Berit Wagner. Berlin: Reimer, 2019, S. 119–42.

“Compilatio at the Portal: The Last Judgment in Bern Cathedral,” in Riemenschneider in situ, eds. Greg Bryda and Katherin Bovine. Turnhout, Brepols: 2020, S. 342–59.

 “Doors of Heaven: A Nostalgic Gaze Materialized,” in Where the Word Became Flesh: The Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth. Cologne: De Gruyter, 2020, S. 179–92. 

Assaf Pinkus and Einat Klafter, “The Scaling Turn: Experiencing Late Medieval Artifacts,” in How Do Images Work, eds. Christine Beier, Tim Juckes, and Assaf Pinkus. Turnhout: Brepols, 2021, S. 43–70.

“Prachtvolle Erscheinung und anmutige Bewegung :Höfisches Dekorum und die Wiener Herzog- Figuren,” in Rudolf der Vierte und der Stephansdom, ed. Barbara Schedl. Cologne: Böhlau, 2021, S. 189–202.

“Out of Sclae: Naming and Identity of Medieval Giants,” in Giants and Dwarfs in Early Modern Europe, eds. Robin O’Bryan (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023), 22 pp.