Episode 203 Part 2: Jenn sat down with the curators behind a fantastic new exhibit at the Getty Museum in LA, Larisa Grollemond and Bryan C. Keene have written and designed an absolutely gorgeous book to accompany it. "The Fantasy of the Middle ages" examines our continuing fascination with the Middle Ages, how medieval manuscript culture shaped our medieval fantasy worlds, and what’s great about Renaissance Faires.

15 October 2022

A Smarthistory dialogue on strategies for teaching Giotto’s famous frescos at the Arena Chapel, including approaches to race, gender, and sexuality in a global Middle Ages.

9 March 2022

The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies is pleased to announce the next lecture in its Online Lecture Series, presented in partnership with Center for Italian Studies and the Italian Studies section of the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania

This lecture centers on the historiography and future of Italian manuscript illumination with the goal of suggesting new methods of attribution and assessment for art historians, dealers, and collectors. The Philadelphia area collections and BiblioPhilly initiative provide ample inspiration for scholars of this material and will form a cornerstone of our focus.  

Within the corpus of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550 and 1568), one reads the biographies of several illuminators, including Lorenzo Monaco, Fra Angelico, the painters of service books for the Sistine Chapel, and Giulio Clovio, the last of whom Vasari called “Michelangelo in miniature.” A present-day counterpart to the Lives is the Dizionario biografico dei miniatori italiani (ed. Milvia Bollati, 2004), which provides biographies of nearly four hundred named artists working from the 9th through 16th century. About one third are documented as illuminators, while another third are recorded as painters and as illuminators, separately, and the final third are assigned by art historians (based on signatures, connoisseurship, or other means). In addition, there are over two hundred and fifty anonymous maestri christened by scholars. Many studies have been informed by the Dizionario and dozens of new artists have since come to light.  

 A specific focus of this paper will be an assessment of the geographic organization by “schools” in the published catalogues of various collections, such as Cambridge (UK), the Cini Foundation, and Kupferstichkabinett collections, and several private holdings. In each, the collaborative nature of manuscript production—by artists, scribes, and other craftspeople from different neighborhoods or regions—is often overshadowed by the career of individual illuminators. A discussion of exhibitions will also be offered, and a vision for future digital collaborations will form the conclusion.

Friday, February 11, 2022

1:00 - 2:30 pm EST via zoom

Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies

University of Pennsylvania

International Center of Medieval Art conversation with Roland Betancourt, Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine; Leah DeVun, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University; Bryan C. Keene, Assistant Professor of Art History at Riverside City College; and Karl Whittington, Associate Professor of History of Art at The Ohio State University. 

16 August 2021 on Zoom

The Book and the Silk Roads, University of Toronto

The Textiles in Armenian Manuscripts co-discussants are Hrair Hawk Khatcherian (independent photographer), Bryan C. Keene (Riverside City College), and Sylvie L. Merian (The Morgan Library & Museum). 

Co-discussants present evidence that highlights Armenian participation in global trade networks as well as regional production of textiles and manuscripts produced for Armenians and other communities living in the Near and Middle East during the medieval and early modern periods. Hawk Khatcherian discusses his work photographing thousands of manuscripts and compiling an archive of over a million photographs of Armenian manuscripts and artifacts. This work includes photographs of Armenian manuscripts in the Armenian diaspora, in North American and European collections as well as images of some of the 14,000 manuscripts at the Matenadaran repository and museum in Yerevan, Armenia. 

Drawing on several examples, co-discussants address possible uses for cloth in Armenian manuscripts, which include cloth doublures that hide manuscripts’ board attachments, spine coverings used in the process of binding, fabric bookmarkers sewn into important sections of the manuscript, foredge tabs, curtains protecting full-page illuminations, votive offerings, and pouches meant to protect and honor manuscripts. Other potential uses include bookmarks or embroidered inserts in manuscripts or page reinforcements in printed books. Examples of textile patterns depicted in manuscript paintings are rich in the Armenian tradition and co-discussants explore how these depictions highlight Armenia’s position as a crossroads between Europe and Asia. 

Co-discussants explore the intermediality presented in the manuscript and its materials and suggest connections between Armenian manuscript painting, textile use, leather and metalwork and the arts of ornamental architecture, liturgical vestments, wall and panel paintings. One of the many case studies highlighted is Morgan Library MS M.1149, a manuscript that contains 25 pieces of fabric which were most likely used as votive offerings. The co-discussants address textile patterns that repeat across multiple manuscripts – especially block-printed cottons, which may have been produced by craftspeople in the region (today Turkey, especially Diyarbakir), rather than imported. 

Several manuscripts, now in dispersed collections, share the same textile doublure and point to their original production or rebinding within the same workshop. Given the dispersion of manuscripts and people in the Armenian diaspora, the proliferation of colophons in this tradition has been of primary importance in placing and dating manuscripts. However, as the presentation makes clear, the manuscripts’ textiles offer important clues about how and where these books were first produced, rebound, and used. Used throughout the manuscript – to reinforce the physical binding, protect the book and its sacred images, decorate and embellish – textiles are an essential part of the layered history of these manuscripts, connecting modern users to the medieval and early modern craftspeople who created and shaped these objects.

This research was aided by consultation with textiles scholars from the Victoria & Albert Museum – Rosemary Crill, Jennifer Wearden, and Clare Browne – as well as Ruth Barnes (Thomas Jaffe Curator of Indo-Pacific Art, Yale University Art Gallery), Philip Sykas (Manchester Metropolitan University), Ariel Salzmann (Queen’s University, Kingston), Sergio La Porta (California State University, Fresno), the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Morgan Library & Museum.

2-3 June 2021

Online via Zoom

Imagining the Polis: Reordering Community

This additional lecture featuring Prof. Bryan Keene (Riverside City College) offers several contexts for approaching Thomas More’s Utopia.

28 January 2021

Presented by the Nova Forum.

The Daniel H. Silberberg Lectures

Scholarship on a global Middle Ages has centered on comparisons or connections across regions and time. This academic and museological turn has contended with problematic terminology, outdated chronologies, and insufficient evidence, and still has a long way to go in working toward equity for traditionally marginalized peoples and places. In 2020, the combined global pandemics of Covid-19 and systemic racism require that all who research, teach, and curate within these fields confront disciplinary biases and actively engage in public or social media discourse. In this lecture, Dr. Bryan C. Keene reflects upon endeavors to expand the remit of global medieval studies and also looks at how queer contemporary artists have drawn inspiration from the Middle Ages in order to disrupt oppressive hierarchical systems in the present.

Thursday, October 15, 2020

6:00 pm EST

The Institute of Fine Arts

New York University

Public Program accompanying the exhibition To Bough and To Bend.

Gardens are rich with associations, as are the trees and plants that grow in them. In art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Garden of Eden was conceived as an earthly paradise while the Garden of Gethsemane commemorated the site of Christ’s agony on the eve of his death. Those episodes from Christian tradition are linked by accounts stating that part of the Tree of Knowledge from creation formed the True Cross of the crucifixion. In this illustrated talk, curator and educator Bryan C. Keene invites guests to take a closer look at illuminations from the Bible of Borso d'Este as well as paintings by Piero della Francesca and Sandro Botticelli.

Saturday, July 11, 2020

12:00pm PST

Bridge Projects

Michele Clapton, costume designer for the first five seasons of Game of Thrones, joins Deborah Landis, director of the Copley Center for Costume Design at UCLA, and Bryan C. Keene, assistant curator of manuscripts at the Getty, to discuss the series' medieval aesthetic and the visual sources for her designs.

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

7:00 pm PDT

Live from the Getty Center, Los Angeles