The Votive Scenario - A presentation by Christopher Wood May 5, 2011

Pilgrims to tombs and shrines leave tokens of gratitude testifying to appeals heeded and wounds healed. Such tokens often take the form of body parts sculpted in wax, fragments that testify to suffering and disorder. The focus in this talk will be the votive offering in the European late middle ages. The votive offering will be interpreted as a rudimentary self-portrait, and in particular as a representation of a self subjected to emergency and contingency. The wax body part anticipates forms of confessional and narrative self-revelation developed in modernity.

Christopher Wood is a professor of the History of Art at Yale University, where he has taught since 1992. He has received Harvard's Jacob Wendell Scholarship and Sheldon Fellowship, a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Fellowship, and a Morse Junior Faculty Fellowship from Yale. Professor Wood was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. Among his most recent publications are Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (2008) and Anachronic Renaissance (with Alexander Nagel, 2010).

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu/thursdayscals11.php