L’art médiéval est-il contemporain ? Is Medieval Art Contemporary?

This publication brings together essays by scholars of both medieval and contemporary art, offering a cross-disciplinary approach of both periods. It investigates how contemporary artists and contemporary art historians perceive medieval art, and, reciprocally, how medieval art historians envisage the echoes of medieval artforms and esthetics in contemporary art. The volume follows on from the symposium organized in conjunction with the exhibition "Make it New: Carte Blanche à Jan Dibbets" that was held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris) in 2019, and which presented side by side Hrabanus Maurus’s De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis (In Praise of the Holy Cross), a masterpiece of Carolingian art, with works by artists associated with conceptual art, mininimal art, and land art.

How and why has medieval art, and particularly early medieval art, inspired contemporary artists since the 1950s? What has medieval art contributed to contemporary art? How has medieval art’s treatment of figures, color, space, geometry, and rhythm provided inspiration for contemporary artists’ experiments with form? In what way does contemporary artists’ engagement with the topics of formatting, writing, semiosis, mimesis, and ornamentation draw inspiration from medieval models? To what extent and in what sense are the notions of authorship and performativity relevant for understanding conceptions of artmaking in both periods? Rather than focusing on medievalism and citational practices, or on the theory of images—both approaches having already produced an important body of comparative readings of medieval and contemporary art—the essays in this volume address the question of medieval art’s contemporaneity thematically, through three trans-chronological topics: authorship, semiosis and mathematics, and performance. Engaging the artists’ works as well as their writings, these studies conflate conceptual and esthetic perspectives.