It is often said that medieval art acted as “books for the illiterate,” and works like the Bayeux Tapestry are commonly compared to comic books. And indeed, one of the theological defenses for art made by medieval churchmen was that it could relate the stories of the Bible and the lives of Saints. But how can static images tell stories? What techniques make it possible to read the passage of time out of an image? How do such visual forms of storytelling interact with texts, from the captions which typically accompanied them to the longer versions of the same stories which one could read in books? What do images add to the texts?
In this course, students will confront textual and visual narratives dating from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. They will consider different media including relief sculpture, manuscript illumination, fresco painting and stained glass, and discuss how the specific limitations and possibilities of these different media shape the resulting images.
- Kursverantwortliche/r: Juliette Calvarin