Art History Lecture: Dr. Nicole Pulichene: "Reusing and Recycling Antiquity in Early Medieval Europe"
A remarkable, though under-studied, group of late antique Roman ivories known as consular diptychs exist today in some forty complete and fragmentary works, originally dated ca. 400—540 CE. These pairs of hinged tablets, featuring distinctive portraits, originally functioned in commemorating a Roman official’s ascent to consul. Almost entirely ignored in scholarship is the fact that the interiors of these diptychs were carved out to accommodate wax writing surfaces. Although the wax has long sense fallen away, the ivory supports still bear legible traces of centuries of subsequent re-inscription by communities of medieval Christians residing in Western Europe. This lecture investigates how the images, names, and liturgical documents recorded in these diptychs forged a relationship between the Roman imperial past and Christian communities, specifically in the context of the memorialization of the dead.
Nicole Pulichene is the Sophia M. Libman National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Humanities in the department of art and archaeology at Hood College in Maryland. Formerly, they were the Robert M. Kingdon fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and, before that, the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Research/Collections Specialist Fellow and a member of the Medieval Ivory Project in the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
This event is free and open to the public. A reception will precede the lecture. It is sponsored by Temple University's General Activities Fund (GAF).