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4:00pm - 5:30pm: Talk

"Autopsia and the Early Art of the Crucifixion"

Generations of art historians argue for a significant shift in aesthetic treatments of the Crucifixion around the year 900. Whether in monumental painting or in ivory carving, artists began to isolate Christ’s death, even capture the moment of his piercing, and present Mary’s suffering with equal tactility. Scholars account for this shift by drawing parallels to Constantinople, to rhetoric of figures like George of Nicomedia or to theologies about Christ’s circumscription which the Crucifixion confirmed. This theology was particularly important in the various polemics of Iconoclasm in the preceding centuries given the need to justify Christ’s pictorial capture in human form. But theology and representation account for a small aspect of these harrowing aesthetics. For the objects associated with this shift reflect a new position of subjectivity, one that demands we recognize the role of touch in experiences of Christ’s death. Byzantine writers even give us a word for this effect: autopsia, or eye-witnessing. But at stake in this sense of witnessing is not just vision of Christ but an immersion in the scene, following Mary’s example. When we uncover the deeper history of autopsia as an aesthetic orientation (with strong respect to aisthēsis or “sensation”, the root of aesthetics), we find that the polemics of Iconoclasm did not engineer any shift or at least was not as significant as previously considered. Materializing autopsia related to a far earlier set of traditions, evidence of which survives from late antique Egypt and Jerusalem. The stakes of this argument recast the history of Passion piety as an art historical phenomenon. The talk is open to all.

Ravi Binning (Ph.D, èצӰ��, 2019) specializes in the art and architecture of the late antique and medieval Mediterranean world. His work is always inspired by the question of how ancient and medieval aesthetics relate to the global present.