SESSION: Confounding Images: Frustration as Art Historical Method

If the mission of Art History is to make sense of visual and material cultures, then what can be learned from objects that resist art-historical study?

This session considers objects and images that panellists find confounding, have struggled to write about, have abandoned the study of, or have found resistant to art-historical methodologies. Speakers reflect on pre-modern artworks that they find compelling, but which they feel they have ‘failed’ to satisfactorily engage in art historical study. The papers consider methodological ‘failings’: art-historical theories that pose significant challenges when applied to pre-modern art.

In reflecting on encounters with the limits of art historical research, we hope to provoke generative discussion about what can be learned from this friction, about both these objects and Art History as a discipline. In doing so, we conceive frustration as a productive method in the study of material culture.

This panel discussion will consist of 10-minute presentations followed by a roundtable discussion and Q&A.

Session Convenors:

Millie M. Horton-Insch, Trinity College Dublin

Lauren Rozenberg, University of East Anglia

Speakers:

Benedetta Mariani, University of East Anglia

The Nowhere man’s land of iconography

Have you ever found yourself looking at an image in a medieval manuscript which is clearly an icon, but at the same time it is relying so much on text that you can’t even properly define it as an image? This is often the case with medieval medical texts, especially of Arabic origin. In this short presentation, through the case study of the tables found in the early fourteenth-century Latin copies of the Tacuinum Sanitatis, I will expose the frustration of dealing with this sort of ambiguous iconography. The core questions at the heart of my presentation will be how do we deal with this sort of non-images but which are indeed icons; would a strictly art historical method fail us? Or rather, would a solely codicological approach present limitations? Ultimately, I propose that this art-historical methodological frustration may enable us to rethink what we consider an image in the medieval transmission of medical knowledge.

Sam Truman, Case Western Reserve University

Unstable Ontologies: Frustrating Representations of the Ghostly Body

In his thirteenth-century collection of devotional poems, Miracles de Nostre Dame, Gautier de Coinci recounts the story of a sacristan named Hubert who, while lighting candles alone in a darkened chapel, hears the disembodied voice of a ghost calling his name.

An image of this encounter appears in a manuscript of the Miracles, likely painted by Jean Pucelle around 1330 (BnF NAF 24541). Here, beneath a delicate Gothic roof, the source of the disembodied voice manifests before the startled sacristan, depicted as a man in monastic robes—visible, tangible, and emphatically embodied.

Taking Pucelle’s miniature as a focal point, this paper explores the ways representations of ghosts contradict, and often actively resist, their accompanying texts. In stories, ghosts exhibit a confounding array of contradictory traits: they can be invisible, but tangible, or, conversely, visible but intangible. In some accounts, a ghost may appear indistinguishable from a living person, its ghostliness revealed only through distinctly supernatural actions such as glowing, vanishing, or passing through solid objects. In others, ghosts bear unmistakably inhuman forms, appearing engulfed in flames or rapidly shape-shifting. Yet, in images, this ambiguous nature is translated into a defined, material form.

The ontological slipperiness of the ghostly body makes ghosts a confounding and often frustrating subject of art historical inquiry. I argue that this visual frustration is a productive and defining feature of ghost imagery, compelling viewers to critically confront their own experience of a seemingly impossible image capable of bridging the perceptible and the imperceptible.

Sergei Zotov

Reveiling” the How-To: Silent Alchemical Albums and the Organisation of Knowledge

This paper examines early modern alchemical albums that organise long sequences of allegorical and technical images without explanatory text, creating visual narratives that resist conventional art-historical interpretation. Produced between 1600 and 1800, these albums differ from recipe books and books of secrets by presenting procedures — distillation, purification, transmutation — as image sequences rather than verbal instructions. Their silence is not a deficiency but a deliberate strategy: a visual mode of organising, (concealing), and transmitting practical knowledge.

By analysing iconographic borrowings, re-use of some textual motifs, and the occasional marginal cyphers, the paper argues that these albums function as procedural handbooks in visual form. By refusing to speak, they disrupt iconographic analysis and frustrate attempts at linear interpretation.

This very resistance reveals the epistemic environment in which such objects were produced. Embedded in networks of compilation, copying, and manuscript circulation in the age of print, silent alchemical albums reflect modes of learning shaped by secrecy. Their refusal to explain themselves exposes the limits of art-historical method while illuminating early modern strategies for managing, preserving, and transmitting specialised knowledge.

In treating this frustration as method, the paper shows how these albums challenge assumptions about what constitutes an “explanatory” image and invites a broader reconsideration of how practical knowledge was visualised, encoded, and circulated in early modern Europe through the simultaneous work of revealing and veiling.

Meg Bernstein, University of East Anglia

Reading Stones, Reading Silence: An Unarchival Approach to England’s Medieval Parish Churches

England has some nine thousand extant parish churches with at least some remaining medieval fabric; of those, very few have much, if any, contemporary documentation about their buildings or artworks. The period that I work on, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, is especially scanty for documentation, which has resulted in a much greater scholarly emphasis on fifteenth and sixteenth century buildings that represent only a part of the story. This contribution examines the interdisciplinary approaches that I have employed to deepen understanding of the abundant, but undocumented parish churches of England’s high Middle Ages.