Description
Book SynopsisA collection of essays by art historians on works of art, artifacts, and monuments that are no longer extant, have disappeared, or perhaps never existed outside of language. Addresses destruction, loss, obscurity, and existential uncertainty within the history of art and the study of historical material and visual cultures.
Trade Review“Destroyed—Disappeared—Lost—Never Were is the sort of scholarship that begins to fill the literal lacunae cautiously avoided by premodern art historians for so long, but perhaps no longer.”
—Elisa A. Foster caa.reviews
“Destroyed—Disappeared—Lost—Never Were makes a fresh contribution to the field, one that dexterously balances historical perspectives and theoretical awareness. Its short essays cover a variety of topics with a global reach but with a common concern: how the ‘existential uncertainty’ resulting from works that are no longer extant or may never have existed outside verbal evocations has shaped and continues to shape the practice of art history.”
—Brigitte Buettner,author of Boccaccio’s “Des cleres et nobles femmes”: Systems of Signification in an Illuminated Manuscript
“Both as a whole and as individual essays, the contents of Destroyed - Disappeared - Lost - Never Were contribute significantly to various urgent scholarly conversations in art history today. Highly original and written by experts in their respective fields, each of the book’s chapters focus on serious lacunae in the medieval discipline, unpacking them in creative ways in relation to both primary and secondary materials. Between them, these exciting essays offer novel readings of previously untreated objects, important revisions to existing historical and theoretical narratives, and original critiques of received historiographies.”
—Jack Hartnell,author of Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages
“[A] cathartic book.”
—William Chester Jordan Mediaevistik
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Destroyed—Disappeared—Lost—Never Were
Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler
1. Jerusalem’s Local Sancta and Their Perishable Frames
Michele Bacci
2. John Lloyd Stephens and the Lost Lintel of Kabah
Claudia Brittenham
3. The Sanguine Art: Four Fragments
Sonja Drimmer
4. The Dreamwork of Positivism: Archaeological Art History and the Imaginative Restoration of the Lost
Jaś Elsner
5. Finding Delight in Gardens Lost
Danielle B. Joyner
6. Impermanence, Futurity, and Loss in Twelfth-Century Japan
Kristopher W. Kersey
7. Lonely Bones: Relics sans Reliquaries
Lena Liepe
8. The Manuscript Machine: Assemblages and
Divisions in Jazarī’s Compendium
Meekyung MacMurdie
9. Cave and Camera: Shades of Loss in the
Library Cave of Dunhuang
Michelle McCoy
10. Mourning the Loss of Works / Praising Their Absence: A Response
Peter Geimer
List of Contributors
