SESSION: Reimagining the Fragment (FULL-DAY PART 1)

This panel seeks to explore the fragment broadly construed as both a physical entity and a methodological approach. In the discipline of art history, the fragment calls to mind ancient marble bodies, like the Belvedere Torso, and the ways in which the unearthing of such objects in the Renaissance produced, as Leonard Barkan observes, a new “aesthetics—which is to say a philosophy and phenomenology proper to art itself.” At the same time, scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum and Linda Nochlin have demonstrated that the fragment can be understood to function as both a potent tool and an emblem of cultural and historical realms as disparate as medieval sanctity and secular modernity. This panel aims to embrace this temporal and epistemological breadth in its investigation of the fragment.

Questions for consideration include, but are not limited to:

How does the fragment destabilize concepts of integrity?
How does the fragment act as a temporal matrix, prompting acts of deferral and memory?
How can encounters with the fragment reveal a previously hidden framework?
How does the fragment act as an agent of mobility?
How can the fragment engage issues of cross-cultural appropriation, dismantling, and re-use?
How does the fragment disrupt, or promote, authorial performance?

We are interested in papers that examine these questions within the context of intermedial and transtemporal dialogue, opening up investigations of palimpsest, collage, and pastiche across disciplinary and geographical boundaries.

Session Convenor:

Carolina Mangone, Princeton University

Jessica Maratsos, University of Cambridge

Part 1 Speakers:

Ester Giachetti, University Ca’ Foscari of Venice, École Normale Supérieure of Paris

Fragments of copies: at the margins of authorship

This paper re-evaluates the lesser-known graphic works of Nicolas Vleughels (1668–1737), considering the fragment as an active site of artistic and historical production, grounded in reuse, mobility, and repetition. Vleughels’s works have often been regarded as secondary pastiches of borrowed fragments, deprived of artistic authenticity. However, rather than being the paintings of a minor or unoriginal artist, these pieces provide a critical perspective from which to study the processes through which motifs circulate, are remade and acquire social meaning.

Through visual and archival analysis, this paper contextualises Vleughels’ fragmentary techniques within the artistic mobility of early eighteenth-century Rome and Paris, where copying and reworking were integral to artistic sociability and professional identity. These practices have been devalued by the aesthetic ideals of eighteenth-century amateurs, founded on notions of singularity and authenticity. But by inhabiting the itinerant, peripheral spaces of these fragments, we can offer an alternative interpretation based on collective and professional phenomena of identity recognition.

Approaching Vleughels’s fragments as agents of mobility and mediation, this paper explores how they challenge established hierarchies of originality and authorship. His fragmentary approach to creation reveals an alternative material practice, redefining the boundaries of graphic invention.

Helen Victoria Murray, Lancaster University

Fragment Variation: A Transhistorical Reading of the Disembodied Hand in Victorian Art

‘Why did Victorian artists make so many studies of hands? Was it just because hands are difficult?’ This question was asked of me while working on the AHRC-funded project The Victorian Hand: Emotions, Embodiment and Identity. Intrigued, I explored the collections catalogues of British Art Institutions in search of preparatory hands. Wherever I researched, I found an array of disembodied hands, painted, drawn and sculpted by the prominent artists of the nineteenth century: Watts, Leighton, Burne-Jones, Gilbert, and more.

The human hand presented Victorian artists with the dual technical challenges of anatomical proficiency and emotional intelligence through gesture. The fragmentary or disembodied hand also told a compelling art historical narrative, from Classical sculpture, through Leonardo and Dürer, to the Academy systems of the nineteenth century. Victorian material culture was likewise engaged with fragmenting the human hand, whether in plaster casts for study and sentiment, hand-shaped jewellery and printed manicule ephemera.

Fragmentary hands in Victorian art were created by artists as preparatory studies for specific works. However, the practice of collecting and cataloguing these works has transformed their reception. Often, these studies of the hand are catalogued as ‘fragment’ – yet I am struck by the compositional unity of the studies. How might we read the preparatory hand as a discrete work of art? Furthermore, how might the hand, separated from its context, operate metonymically for the narrativized body?

This paper argues for a transhistoricity of the fragmented human hand, which echoes the hand’s anatomy by reaching across epochal lines.

Alyson Lai, University of York

Potentialisation of the past: the fragment in Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau

Destroyed in 1943, Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau was an enigmatic architectural-sculptural assemblage composed of innumerable discarded fragments and ruins, growing out of one room and eventually subsuming his Hannover family residence. Here, fragments were never finalised. Schwitters continually manipulated, reshaped, and reassembled them for as long as he occupied the home, famously declaring his magnum opus “incomplete on principle”. Rather than accepting Merzbau’s unfinishedness, as present scholarship has done, thereby imposing upon it a framework of failure, my paper interprets Schwitters’s constant reconfiguration of his fragments as a deliberate act of deferral, consistently drawing the space back into a state of potentiality. By examining the instability of the fragments in Merzbau and their relationship to commemoration, alongside the evolution of a few notable examples, the paper aims to demonstrate that the fragment, for Schwitters, held the crucial function of facilitating a dynamic and metamorphosing form of memory work, contrary to conventional forms of remembrance typically anchored in specific historical moments. The many lives and new guises adopted by the same fragment in Merzbau evidences the possibility that the fragment was, above all else, Schwitters’s prompt for restoring endless possibilities to the past, echoing Walter Benjamin’s conception of the past as “open, contingent, and unknowable as the future itself” (Bradley, 2019). Ultimately, the paper argues for Merzbau’s ontological status not as an object, but as a kind of method, one in which time was a prerequisite for the fragment to continue functioning as a catalyst for imaginative remembrance.

C. D. Dickerson, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Andrew Sears, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Exhibition Discussion: Broken: The Power of the Fragment in Sculpture

This talk, given jointly by C. D. Dickerson and Andrew Sears, will explore the challenges of organizing a forthcoming exhibition about fragments across time and place: Broken: The Power of the Fragment in Sculpture (Fall 2026 at Palazzo Strozzi; Spring 2027 at NGA). Though in many ways fragments lend themselves to close looking and museum display, they are also highly contradictory objects that resist a single narrative arc. We will reflect on strategies for engaging these tensions and creating narrative counterpoints throughout the exhibition: approaches we have developed in conversation with art historians, conservators, museum educators, and community advisory groups. Through this collaborative process, we have come to recognize the importance of rethinking curatorial and institutional voice when presenting works as challenging as fragments—many intersecting with multiple histories of violence—and finding solutions for bringing forth a multiplicity of perspectives.