MEDIEVAL ART AT PLAY

Medieval art has been fashionable in the past. Our age has often plunged into it as well. We live in a post-medieval world for centuries, as nearly as we can live in a post-classical world. Sometimes we have devoted ourselves to denying and criticizing the Middle Ages, taking them as an example of an undesirable and dark Age, but at the same time we have been able to free ourselves from some prejudices, and to be passionate about their realities. It’s undeniable that the Middle Ages also have their charisma. We let ourselves be seduced by the environments, the attires and the changed profile of those early days about which cinema told us, or that we still glimpse through painting or miniature of the time, magnificent and colored. Remoteness endorses the impalpable dimensions of history and makes reconversions, adaptations, general adjustments, succulent lies easier, while the art leads us to concrete harbours. By this route, an imaginary develops – imaginary that hatches in medieval, medieval-style, neo-medieval, medievalist proposals, which value those times and are inspired in them and which, without depleting the Middle Ages, bring us further.

The multiple glances on medieval art constitute the subject that we propose to tackle in the EMAC Group’s IV International Symposium, MEDIEVAL ART AT PLAY. These have their onset within the same period because, let’s not forget that, there are a lot of medieval arts and many medieval mentalities. We don’t leave out the Middle Ages looking at the Middle Ages. The Gotich endorsing Romanesque art, or other styles, is a good example when it represents, reinterprets or embodies them. It’s always good to undo some topics about medieval art, but the aim is not so much this as the opportunity to study how each historical period has handled the art of the Middle Ages. Therefore, we are moved by the investigation of every new perspective’s sense and by the clichés that it has originated. The issues in the historiography attend these investigations, also associated to the impact of medieval art in the art and creativity of the modern and contemporary eras. Hence, let’s put medieval art into play, let’s put it in our focus, and let’s try to hit the target through the different ages and approaches that have challenged or appreciated it, either through the artists’, promoters’, scholars’ or its audience’s voices. Let’s draw conclusions about its fortune and don’t forget that the artistic material is something flexible, adaptable, able to impress and be impressed. In essence, we offer you MEDIEVAL ART AT PLAY and we invite you to play from different perspectives.