Hon.-Prof. Assaf Pinkus, BA PhD

 

 

Zi: 3F.02.24A
E: assaf.pinkus@univie.ac.at

 

 

 

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.