Dear Colleagues and Friends,

we would like to invite you to a lecture of the tenth year of StředověC JinaX. On Thursday, 16 December 2021 at 7 PM, Vincent Debiais (École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris) will deliver his lecture The Angel in the Square – Silence in Medieval Images. Following the current restrictions, we would like to invite only students and employees of the MUNI to the Hans Belting Library. As public is not allowed to enter the university buildings, we have enabled remote access via live broadcast on YouTube here.

The lecture will be accessible later on our YouTube profile (here).

ABSTRACT

The study of silence in the Middle Ages, of its representation in medieval images and, more generally, of the intellectuals and formal links between silence and visual arts, is part of a global trend of Humanities and Social Sciences (philosophy, history, art history, anthropology) despite of all the difficulties this topic can raise: what kind of silence can be possibility sought in medieval images? In this lecture, we would like to share some of the insights of a long-term research project on the place and form of silence in medieval visual culture, focusing on the aspects of visibility and invisibility. After presenting the historiographical background of the topic and the medieval intellectual framework of the notion of silence, three case studies or clusters of images staging the idea of silence and its medieval properties will be explored to stress the ontological radicalism of these acts of image.