Aktuelle Forschungsprojekte

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.

-> zurück