Beate Fricke: Miracles of Mediation

A late medieval panel painting of an Annunciation scene in a converted mosque is infused with artistic reflections about how to stage a divine moment and present it to the viewer. Played with are the relationships between constructed painterly narrative and performed liturgical drama, between imagination and experience, between inspiration and conception. This lecture will explore how such connections are expressed in the painting through the shifting relationships between caused miracle (incarnation/semination), mediated miracle (communion), and saintly interlocutors.

Beate Fricke is Professor and Chair of European Medieval Art at the Institute of Art History at the University of Bern. Previously, she was professor for Medieval Art at the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Fallen Idols, Risen Saints: Sainte Foy of Conquest and the Revival of Monumental Sculpture in Medieval Art (2015). Currently she is working on her second book Beautiful Genesis: Creation and Procreation in Late Medieval Art (under contract with Penn State University Press).