Confirmed Speaker abstracts S-Z

 

Romedio Schmitz-Esser: An established practice? Dissection before 1350

In this paper I am going to ask if there might have been an already established practice of dissecting the corpse in the Early and High Middle Ages. In fact, from the 9th century onwards, there is frequent proof for the transportation and eventually the embalming of corpses by use of a technique that disembowelled the cadaver. Considering written sources, by the 12th century, all three body cavities were opened to achieve better results in embalming the medieval elite. With the 13th century, first traces of forensic examination can be found, be it in church proceedings or in the forming medical schools of Southern France and Northern Italy. I will argue that the medical dissection came out of this tradition evolved in the centuries before. Archaeological evidence, only infrequently used in this discussion by medical historians so far, shows that the use of the practice was more widespread as thought up to now. Theological objections against the disintegration of the human corpse seem to have played little role when it came to the caring for the “special” dead, the saints and the members of the ecclesiastical and secular elite. I would love to instigate the discussion on a possible impact the practice of embalming had on the arts. It seems no coincidence that the frequent embalming techniques for the elite of the 12th century coincide with the evolvement of the idea of the personification of death and the frequent depiction of the dead in the later Middle Ages. However, this complex relation can only be understood in an interdisciplinary setting - like the one set up by the Winchester conference.

 

Romedio, currently the director of the Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani at Venice, Italy, is a German medievalist. His research interests include the material culture of the Middle Ages, the knowledge transfer between Asia and Europe, and the history of the corpse. His habilitation on this topic was published in 2014 (for a review by Joachim Whaley, see attachment). He studied history and art history at Innsbruck University (PhD in 2005) and worked at Munich’s LMU University (until 2014). He had longer research stays at London, Paris (École des hautes études en sciences sociales) and Duke University, Durham/NC, USA, and taught in Guangzhou, China.

 

Sarah Schwarz: Mourning, Grieving, and Mortuary Matters: Where did it all begin?

Modern human cultures regularly honour the dead through various mortuary practices and funerary rituals, but how did they develop, and were modern humans (Homo sapiens) the first to put such abstract ideas into practice?

 

Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) are often viewed as our savage and inferior hominid ‘cousins’ from the Middle Palaeolithic (approximately 300,000 – 30,000 years before present (BP)), but they also demonstrate the ability to bury their dead – an ability which had previously been held as a key characteristic in defining behavioural modernity, and by extension what makes us ‘human’. Honouring the dead through mortuary practices (such as burial) demonstrates an important cognitive advancement: not only the ability to understand and employ such ideas, but the decision to deviate valuable time and resources away from activities which could directly contribute to the group’s survival.

 

This paper will address whether the archaeological record of the Middle Palaeolithic suggests a well-established structured response to death, and evaluate the evidence for a more ancient origin to our cultural need to honour the dead. Multiple cases of intentional Neanderthal burial suggest that this is deliberate and regulated act of remembrance, rather than a random act of kindness or preservation. In addition, alternative methods of mortuary practice may have also been in use, including corpse processing techniques such as defleshing and disarticulation.

 

Sarah is a PhD student in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Southampton. Her research focuses on Neanderthal mortuary practices and the origins of structured cultural responses to death in the Palaeolithic, although I also have an interest in human osteoarchaeology and the application of mortuary practices in different cultures.

 

Chloe Sharpe: Rossendo Nobas’ funerary skeleton sculpture (1888) for the anatomy professor Dr. Jaime Farreras: A nineteenth-century Spanish cadaver tomb?

This paper focuses on an arresting, popular but misunderstood work which is quite unique within nineteenth-century tomb sculpture, and considers its possible classification as Rossendo Nobas’ version (or subversion) of a medieval cadaver tomb.

Despite distinguishing himself nationally and internationally with the prize-winning sculpture Dying bullfighter – admired by critics for showing death without causing repulsion  – Nobas found it necessary to supplement his income by working as the official sculptor of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Barcelona from 1879. It is presumably here, while he produced explicit anatomical models of bodily deformations for teaching purposes (which are not for the faint-hearted), that he met the anatomy and osteology professor Dr. Jaime Farreras, who commissioned Nobas to produce his tomb. The result is a shrouded skeleton of exceptional realism, which demonstrates the sculptor’s accurate anatomical knowledge combined with an impulse to beautify and dignify death, derived from his classical artistic training. While skeletons in cemetery sculpture are usually personifications of death, Nobas’ skeleton uniquely appears to function as a representation of the dead doctor, whose name is inscribed in large letters below it. Or does it? In 1905, the doctor was still alive, allowing him at least 17 years to visit his tomb and contemplate himself dead; in line with the cadaver tomb tradition, but unusually for a nineteenth-century tomb, it could thus function as a memento mori for the man himself. Perhaps the man of science and reason wished to demonstrate that he knew, and calmly accepted, the fate of his earthly remains. Or was the sculpture a monument to the successful career of the ambitious Farreras, in which the beholder occupied the physical position of the doctor standing before a skeleton in the medical school? The original architectural drawings suggest that perhaps religion was not foremost in the doctor’s mind when he commissioned this singular memorial.

 

Chloe is a White Rose College of Arts and Humanities funded PhD student at the University of York, where she isresearching multiple bodies in Spanish cemetery sculpture c.1890-1936. She has a BA in English and History of Art from the University of Birmingham (first), and MAs in Art History (dist.) and in Museum Studies (dist.). From 2011-2013 she held a curatorial internship at the Prado Museum and previously worked as Gallery Assistant at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts. She has also worked in language and art education. Her research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century sculpture, art at international exhibitions, Spanish art and illustrated travel literature.

 

Perdita Sinclair with Juian Baker: Talking about ‘Covert Colours’

As part of my artistic practice I study the human form and its anatomy. I wanted to work with a partner running human dissections so that I could investigate the internal colours of the body. Julian Baker  runs courses focusing on the fascia and connective tissue structures, rather than standard anatomical approaches and who was keen to work with an artist whose work represents the human body in an unconventional way. I have now been artist in residence to two of Julian's courses conducting five day dissections which involved three complete cadavers that were dissected by the course attendees while I recorded, on paper, the fascinating and unexpected forms and colours in this challenging environment. This has gone on to inspire larger-scale paintings and sculptures. One of the end goals of this project will be a collaborative exhibition and publication.

At the Death, Art and Anatomy conference Julian and I would like to talk about our collaborative experience, how we see it evolving and what individual perspectives we bring to it.

 

Perdita was awarded, in 2015, an Artist International Development Fund by Arts Council and the British Council to network and exhibit around China, where her work is currently touring. She has worked with the Millennium Seed Bank, Ventnor Botanic Gardens and the Booth Museum of Natural History. In the UK her work has been show in the National Portrait Gallery, The Laing Gallery and the Royal Academy of Art amongst many others. Here work can be viewed here.

 

Julian, a body worker for over 20 years, is the founder of the European College of Bowen Studies, ECBS, the author of two books on Bowen and Fascia and has contributed hundreds of articles about bodywork, fascia, dissection and the human form. Julian has presented widely at conferences around the world and is on the organising committee of the British Fascia Symposium 2016. See www.functionalfascia.com

 

Patricia Skinner: 'Unrecognisable faces: medieval disfigurement and the dead

Medieval representations of the dead include textual descriptions of disfiguring and dismembering dead bodies, and sculptural and other representations of facial mutilation and injury. In this paper, I will explore evidence for these practices, examining the motives behind facial mutilation, and ask how and why certain types of mutilation were recorded. Anatomically, consideration will be given to the subsequent interpretation of dismemberment and disfigurement in archaeological and other reports, as well as to the ambiguous meanings of sculptures of women with bandaged faces. It will be suggested that whilst a disfigured face might be an object of sympathy whilst a person was alive, the deliberate removal of facial and other features in corpses was universally considered a sign of contempt and condemnation.

 

Patricia is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Winchester. She is currently leading a major research consortium on facial disfigurement from antiquity to the present day. Her book, Living with Disfigurement in the Early Middle Ages, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan later in 2016.

 

Amanda Smallbone: medieval choral mass (details will be given in a seperate programme) for the performance during the Friday wine reception

Amanda, since training as a singer and pianist at the Guildhall School of Music in London, has enjoyed a varied career as a performer, arts manager and lecturer. After spending 10 years in London combining her work as a freelance session singer and teacher with producing arts events for the City of London Festival, Spitalfields Festival, Wigmore Hall, and the Corporation of London, she was appointed as Director of Communications for IMG Artists Asia. She then spent 6 years working in Kuala Lumpur as part of a team tasked with setting up Malaysia’s first concert hall and symphony orchestra, continuing to combine this with developing teaching and performance portfolio throughout the region. On her return to the UK she completed an MA in contemporary performance and focused on developing research and practice in the area of contemporary vocal pedagogies. Since 2010 she has developed a unique undergraduate programme in interdisciplinary voice studies at the University of Winchester for which she acts as programme leader and senior lecturer, and has also been a visiting lecturer at music departments in Italy and Turkey. She the co-founder of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Voice Studies and serves on the editorial board of the Journal for Interdisciplinary Voice Studies published by Intellect.

 

Kathryn Smith: ‘Between Subject and Object’: Anatomy of an exhibition

Between Subject and Object: human remains at the interface of art and science was an exhibition presented at Michaelis Galleries (University of Cape Town) in August 2014, curated by Kathryn Smith, Josephine Higgins and Penny Siopis. This was the first time a considered, curatorial effort was made to link anatomical specimens and creative visual practice in the same exhibition environment and as such, it signalled the nascent field of medical humanities as a focus of interdisciplinary research in that country.

 

This paper presents a critical reflection of the project towards a proposed publication. It focuses on the central pivot of the show, prompted by a consideration of contemporary post-mortem photography after two studies by Smith (1999) and Higgins (2013), that representations of the dead exist on a spectrum between an emphasis on the subject-ness of the deceased individual and the object-ness of the corpse. The collected works and artefacts (including performance and film) extended the conventional relationships that photography is understood to have with ‘the real’ – as index, representation or copy – towards a broader notion of ‘the photographic’, through ideas of trace and analogy (material, ontological, experiential, evidential, affective).

 

This analysis frames the project as an exploratory, self-reflexive, and dialogical attempt to challenge conventional post-mortem representations. The ethical imperatives of working with human remains (and representations thereof) are framed as primary considerations within a highly specific complex cultural context that lacks a robust scholarly focus on the visual and material cultures of death.

 

Kathryn is an interdisciplinary visual artist with a specialization in craniofacial identification and depiction. In addition to her forensic practice, topics of interest include risk, experimentation and the avant-garde, the visual cultures of science and the ethics of collecting and displaying human remains. She has exhibited and published extensively, including several major curatorial projects for museums and galleries. She was Fine Arts programme co-ordinator at Stellenbosch University (South Africa) from 2006-2015, and is currently reading for a PhD in forensic art at Liverpool John Moores University, based in Face Lab.

 

Lisa Temple-Cox and Glenn Harcourt: "IT'S MY OWN INVENTION" - Looking Glass and Speculum: An Anatomical Alice

This presentation discusses a series of linked artworks and texts on which we have been collaborating, and which explore the legacy of Vesalius's great work, De Humani Corporis Fabrica.  Our work will combine a range of source materials including plates from the Fabrica, as well as other anatomical atlases; Renaissance maps related to the geography of Vesalius's life, work, and heritage; text drawn from various sources (but especially the Fabrica) in Latin and English; Lisa’s own drawings; and the figure of Alice in Wonderland as she was visualised by Sir John Tenniel. The images are built up using a photo-transfer technique in which a printed copy of image or text is glued onto the page and the paper carefully removed, leaving only the ink. After a number of layers a composite image is built up: palimpsests of fragmented, semi-transparent pictorial fields that will act both as content and as a frame for the drawing and hand-lettering. This process is imperfect and variable, allowing for reversals and accidents that themselves inform the direction and composition of the final image: the over-drawing serving to integrate and consummate the process.

 

The maps will articulate the "ground," at the back of each image, like a pattern embedded in the paper. Thus, in the tradition of Vesalius' contemporary, Mercator, a geographical atlas will underlie images taken from Vesalius’ own ground-breaking “atlas” of the anatomy of the human body. These 'embedded' maps will form a time-line that links Vesalius' travels throughout his life with key contemporary locations associated with his legacy. Each image will have at its heart one large image from the Fabrica (inevitably, these will be primarily drawn from the osteological and myological plates) which will be paired with a facing page of associated text; and every page will be worked up with subsidiary images, so that the whole sequence will read as a kind of rhythmic collage of alternating image and text.

 

Tenniel’s Alice, meanwhile, will act as a unifying narrative device, an interior interlocutor who will explore the 'wonderland' of Vesalius' anatomy, and act as both guide and metaphor as her looking-glass becomes a speculum for exploring the body’s structure in depth.  As Alice journeys through the plates, her experience of discovery will hopefully model and mirror the viewer’s own. Our eventual aim is to create a graphic novel that charts a journey of bodily and intellectual self-discovery, and that discusses the paradigm-changing work of Vesalius both as a historical artefact in the field of anatomy: an illustrated text through which we can come to experience and understand our own bodies as they are structured anatomically, and express our essential humanity.

 

Lisa is is an artist based at Cuckoo Farm Studios in Colchester, UK. Her research concerns the aesthetics and symbolism of the medical museum; using its collections, taxonomies, and histories as metaphors for a contemporary subjective experience of the self and the body. Her background as a mixed-race, post-colonial child informs a practice exploring interstices: between science and religion, the normal and the pathological, the familiar and the uncanny. These themes are visualised through mixed-media processes which include drawing, assemblage, and installation.

 

Glenn is a writer who specialises in the history of art, contemporary art, and visual culture. Formerly a lecturer on Art History and the humanities, he is a regular contributor to art journals 'X-TRA' and 'Artillery', and is currently the recipient of a Wood Institute grant at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia to begin work on a "double biography" of one of the Mutter Museum's most popular specimens of pathological anatomy, Mary Ashberry.

 

Panayota Volti: Relics beneath a saint's image: transcending death through visual semiotics in the late Middle Ages

In the Late Middle Ages, epidemics and wars, but also the individual responsibility of the faithful towards their own salvation, are the corollary of the emergence of carved cadaver sculptures. However, there are also some paintings in which saints look completely emaciated, almost like corpses in decomposition. According to medieval religious beliefs the sacred materiality of saints did not disappear at death: she was perpetuated in the earthly world through an unalterable substance, the bodily relics, concrete objects of veneration, sometimes miraculous, source of transcendent hope for salvation. Thus, these paintings do not highlight mortality: they would rather propose an accessible visual and devotional proximity of a meaningful “mise en abyme” between the saints and their bodily relics, the tangible vestiges of both their human existence and their sacred immortality. We can also note that while some artists (like Cosimo Tura, Carlo Crivelli, Matthias Grünewald) opt for representations of saints in the features and the looks of cadavers, this is not their exclusive idiom: in some other works, they represent saints as perfectly alive humans. Through the study of some characteristic paintings in which the representation of saints seems co-substantial of their own relics, we will explore the place and the semantic role of these creations in the spiritual context of their time, their possible relations with both the official theology and the pious literature (such as Artes moriendi), but also the motivations of their sponsors, in order to identify and interpret the semiotic dynamics through which these works channelled and expressed fundamental questions and attitudes of their contemporaries towards death and afterlife.

 

Panayota is assistant professor in Medieval Art History at Université Paris Ouest – Nanterre. Her researches concern, among others, monastic architecture and religious iconography of the Late Middle Ages through an interpretative-anthropological approach, often with connections to other disciplines and/or periods as well as gender studies.

 

Alasdair Watson: Die before you die: asceticism in Islamic art, literature, and praxis

Ascetic characters such as Majnūn Laylā feature prominently in mediaeval Persian poetical and hagiographical works which were often illustrated with miniature paintings depicting the ascetic. These works subsequently became very popular in Mughal India where the accompanying illustrations of Majnūn made by Indian artists display a much greater degree of emaciation to the subject’s body, than in comparable Persian depictions.This paper discusses the differences between depictions of Majnūn in Persian and Indian art and how they relate to the texts that they serve to illustrate, as well as their relationship to the depiction of other holy figures such as yogis in Mughal Indian painting. To further contextualize the images, the paper also touches on the philosophy of hunger as spiritual tool in the Islamic tradition and how it was practised by early Ṣūfīs of the ascetic school as a means of disciplining the soul (riyāḍat al-nafs), and how this philosophy and praxis was reclaimed and synthesised into mainstream Islam by later teachers such as Ghazālī (d. 1111).

 

Alasdair, a translator, researcher, and librarian, is Bahari Curator at the Bodleian Libraries with responsibility for Middle Eastern and Islamic manuscripts, and Wellcome Research Fellow for the History of Medicine at the Oriental Institute, Oxford. Alasdair’s current research includes the Philosopher-Physicians of Iraq and Iran in the 9th-13th centuries, and the History of the Lemon as materia medica.

 

Claudia Wilburn: Sermon and Cemeteries: Where Death and a Body of Art Collide

This paper and presentation is about my artistic process creating Reflections, a body of work exploring the intersection of art and death as well as the religious and spiritual iconography made representative through cemetery art, and sermons in the Southeastern United States. This work began as an investigation and spiritual art-making experience that connected me to my pastor grandfather's sermons, my memories of loved ones who had passed away and the connections between this personal narrative and the public iconography of death found in cemeteries in the southeastern United States.  My process encompassed taking photographs of cemeteries in Columbia and Charleston, SC, Atlanta and Savannah, GA, and New Orleans, LA.  The art pieces made from these photographs include a variety of mixed media processes such as, image transfers, digital printing, and collage. One distinct group of work incorporates imagery of cemetery saints and icons that were translated from photographs into large woodcuts. These works provide me with a visual interpretation of my own memories.   As I have exhibited this work, I find that there is a universal connection made with viewers, some with similar experiences to the memory or emotion I present. 

Examples from this body of artwork can be found at the following links:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/claudiawilburn/albums/72157650303988365

https://www.flickr.com/photos/claudiawilburn/albums/72157649861578659

 

Claudia received her Master’s of Fine Art from the University of South Carolina in May of 2008 and her Bachelor’s of Fine Art in Drawing from Clemson University.  Currently she is an Associate Professor of Art & Design at Brenau University in Gainesville, GA.  She won recognition in being named Young Artist of the Year through the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina in the Fall of 2006.  Since then she has had seven solo exhibitions and shown in over twenty group exhibitions. Most recently, her exhibition titled “Reflections” was displayed at Jim Cherry Gallery on the Perimeter College Campus in Atlanta, GA in the Spring of 2015 as well as at the Rebecca Randall Art Gallery at Coastal Carolina University in Myrtle Beach South Carolina in the Summer of 2015.

 

Caroline Wilkinson: Depicting Faces of the Dead: The Changing Culture associated with Forensic Facial Identification

The depiction of faces of the dead can be a useful tool for promoting recognition leading to identification in forensic investigation, and post-mortem facial depiction is described as the interpretation of human remains in order to suggest the living appearance of an individual. The visual recognition of a decedent by a family member is commonplace in forensic investigation and is often employed as identity confirmation. However, it is recognized that misidentification from facial recognition is common and faces of the dead may be extremely difficult to recognize due to decomposition or external damage, and even immediate post-mortem changes may be significant enough to confuse an observer. However, the decision to utilise a post-mortem facial depiction may be controversial and is intimately tied up with the social, political and cultural context of the investigation. This paper provides an historical context relating to the changing view of society to the presentation and publication of post-mortem facial depictions and discusses the current ethical, practical and academic challenges associated with these images.

 

Caroline is Director of Liverpool School of Art & Design and Director of Face Lab. Caroline has a background in art and science and her research and creative work sits at the forefront of art-science fusion and includes subjects as diverse as forensic art, human anatomy, medical art, face recognition, forensic science, anthropology, 3D visualisation, digital art and craniofacial identification. Caroline is Director of the Face Lab, a LJMU research group based in Liverpool Science Park. Her archaeological work includes facial depictions of Richard III, St Nicolas, J.S. Bach, Rameses II and Mary, Queen of Scots..

 

Cindy Wood: Preparing for Death - the Case of the English Cage Chantry Chapel

In the Later Middle Ages the immediacy of death was a major preoccupation of the living. To avoid the horrors of Purgatory (the space between death and the Day of Final Judgement) the living were exhorted to include the dead in their prayers and masses, while at the same time planning to mitigate these horrors for themselves through pious works. Many of the pious works can still be seen in surviving churches, but it is the chantry chapels in the major churches and cathedral of England that can illustrate how they used art and structures to demonstrate this need for prayers after death. These physical structures shall the focus of this paper. The specific example of cage chantries, a uniquely English phenomenon, particularly demonstrates how the use of decoration, effigies and sheer physical presence were used to impress the living and encourage these intercessionary prayers.

 

There are 55 known cage chantries, of which over 40 have survived, but these are probably only illustrative of the number originally built. Their location in a church could demonstrate the piety of their founder, their use of imagery (both religious and secular) were designed to draw the attention of the passer by and the use of individual heraldry, rebus and initials recalled the founder to those performing the masses for their souls or those offering their prayers. This group, all built between 1366 and 1534, can offer in insight into the piety of the period, the relationship between the living and the dead and be representative of the art used in churches in this period, much of which has been lost in the intervening centuries.

 

Cindy is a lecturer in the History Department of the University of Winchester, specialising in the late medieval period. Her research specialisms are in chantries, chantry chapels and intercession. Shes likes to use both documentary and physical evidence for her studies and has case studies in print for specific churches and their chantries; St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle and Christchurch Priory. She is in the process of preparing my PHD thesis for publication which looks at the uniquely English group of chantry chapels known as 'Cage Chantries'; a small portion of which will be examined in the paper for this conference.