Destroyed—Disappeared—Lost—Never Were

Beate Fricke, Aden Kumler, Beate Fricke, Aden Kumler

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780271093284
• eBook ISBN: 9780271093741
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

To write about works that cannot be sensually perceived involves considerable strain. Absent the object, art historians must stretch their methods to, or even past, the breaking point. This concise volume addresses the problems inherent in studying medieval works of art, artifacts, and monuments that have disappeared, have been destroyed, or perhaps never existed in the first place.

The contributors to this volume are confronted with the full expanse of what they cannot see, handle, or know. Connecting object histories, the anthropology of images, and historiography, they seek to understand how people have made sense of the past by examining objects, images, and architectural and urban spaces. Intersecting these approaches is a deep current of reflection upon the theorization of historical analysis and the ways in which the past is inscribed into layers of evidence that are only ever revealed in the historian's present tense.

Highly original and theoretically sophisticated, this volume will stimulate debate among art historians about the critical practices used to confront the formative presence of destruction, loss, obscurity, and existential uncertainty within the history of art and the study of historical material and visual cultures.

In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Michele Bacci, Claudia Brittenham, Sonja Drimmer, Ja? Elsner, Peter Geimer, Danielle B. Joyner, Kristopher W. Kersey, Lena Liepe, Meekyung MacMurdie, and Michelle McCoy.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Destroyed—Disappeared—Lost—Never Were
• 1. Jerusalem’s Loca Sancta and Their Perishable Frames
• 2. John Lloyd Stephens and the Lost Lintel of Kabah
• 3. The Sanguine Art: Four Fragments
• 4. The Dreamwork of Positivism: Archaeological Art History and the Imaginative Restoration of the Lost
• 5. Finding Delight in Gardens Lost
• 6. Impermanence, Futurity, and Loss in Twelfth-Century Japan
• 7. Lonely Bones: Relics sans Reliquaries
• 8. The Manuscript Machine: Assemblages and Divisions in Jazarī’s Compendium
• 9. Cave and Camera: Shades of Loss in the Library Cave of Dunhuang
• 10. Mourning the Loss of Works / Praising Their Absence: A Response
• List of Contributors