The Yale History of Art Department and Medieval Studies Program invite you to join us for an event celebrating Jacqueline Jung’s new book, Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture (Yale University Press, 2020). The result of over two decades of thinking and teaching about the dazzling visual effects of monumental cathedral arts, the book offers a radical reassessment of Gothic sculpture. This art, it contends, does not just effectively imitate human forms but also engages the bodies and minds of beholders in forceful ways, responding to and directing their movements through the encompassing space and sparking affective and imaginative associations in the process.
Filled with more than 500 photos that bring to view the dynamism of cathedral sculpture in novel ways, Eloquent Bodies demonstrates how viewers in the past and the present confronted sculptured bodies at major thirteenth-century cathedrals, from Chartres, Reims, and Strasbourg in France to Bamberg, Magdeburg, and Naumburg in Germany. The book illuminates the ways artistic ingenuity, technical skill, and liturgical needs converged to enliven sacred spaces for distinct audiences, while in its methods it makes a powerful argument for the importance of multi-perspectivalism in the study of art.
In a conversation with Gregory Bryda, Jung will discuss aspects of how this project took shape, the challenges posed by photography, and the book’s engagements with both the older historiography and current art historical concerns. Questions from the audience will be welcome as well.
Jacqueline Jung is Associate Professor of the History of Art, and a core faculty member of the Medieval Studies Program, at Yale University. Her previous book, The Gothic Screen: Space, Sculpture, and Community in the Cathedrals of France and Germany, ca. 1200-1400 (Cambridge University Press, 2013) was co-winner of the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America. Her translation of Aloïs Riegl, Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts (Zone 2004) will be issued in paperback this spring.
Gregory Bryda (Yale PhD 2016) is Assistant Professor of Art History at Barnard College. His article “The Exuding Wood of the Cross at Isenheim,” Art Bulletin 100 (2018) received the 2019 Emerging Scholars Essay Prize from the Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art (HGSCEA). A volume he co-edited with Katherine Boivin, Riemenschneider in Situ will be published by Brepols this spring, and he is presently completing a monograph called The Trees of the Cross.
