FoRMS December Meeting

Listen to three students present some work from upcoming term papers:

Bevin Killen (History): "The Turning of the Year: Time and Devotion in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe"

Looking at three books of hours from France and the Netherlands from the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries (respectively), this paper seeks to investigate how notions of time shaped personal devotion in late medieval and early modern Europe. Specifically, the calendar portions of books of hours have often been seen as auxiliary to the books' central purpose: to structure time and prayer within a 24-hour cycle. However, by examining the patterns of wear on these three books and their place in the larger collections of their owners, I hope to demonstrate that these calendars also served a sacral purpose, as focal points for devotion as well as temporal structures.

Yueling Li (History of Art): "Microcosm through Tea: Liquescent and Mimetic Materiality of Song Black Glazed Tea Bowls":

Known as Jian zhan or Tenmoku, black glaze tea bowls are cherished for their surface resemblance of hare’s fur, mottled feather and oil drops. Praised for their ideal physical property as container for tea, black glazed bowls make their appearance into poems and classics by Su Shi, Cai Xiang, and Emperor Huizong. Focusing on the surface aesthetics of black glazed tea containers in Song Dynasty, the phenomenological approaches of this essay is framed by the material force of water and the transmateriality of liquescence. Primarily, it examines the physical firing transformation inside the kiln, and the transformative power of the finished surface to evoke in its beholder a mimesis of animate creatures and weather phenomenon in nature. This discussion of the container is followed by a discussion of the liquid being contained within—tea—as a popular commodity that traveled along land, river and sea routes and as an index of social status and literati culture. Examining textual and visual depiction of tea production and appreciation, this essay argues that tea culture in Song dynasty involved innovation on many levels, from technological apparatus such as hydraulic mills to a heightened multisensory perception of not only seeing but hearing water. This essay concludes with tea bowls as an itinerant object that went with the flow from rivers to the sea, and traveled from Fujian to Zhejiang to Japan. By doing so, this essay attempts an ecocritical case study of East Asian art history.

Doyun Kim (History of Art): "Ecoaesthetics of the Sacred Landscape: The Virgin of Valvanera in colonial Mexico":

Abstract: In this essay, I argue that the Virgin of Valvanera at the Denver Art Museum offers a reimagined vision of the Marian apparition inspired by the ecological conditions of colonial Mexico. The Virgin of Valvanera, attributed to Juan Correa (1646–1716), features the miraculous discovery of the Marian statue in La Rioja, Spain. The painting is noteworthy for its distinctive ecoaesthetics. Allocating more than half of the picture plane to a landscape, it integrates the Marian image with sylvan surroundings and the architectural complex into an organic whole. To explain this perception of interconnectivity, I examine the visual elements of the painting with various other factors, including arboreal subjectivity, the cave’s association with water and meteorological phenomena, and the pluvial landscapes of Mesoamerica. I conclude that the Virgin of Valvanera presents the potential of forging a different relationship with nature in eighteenth-century colonial Mexico.