![]() They were positioned on the streets leading away from the House of Pilate, a Nürnberg evocation of the place of Christ’s sentencing. They show Christ’s Seven Falls, moments in the Passion when things were just too much for him and he collapsed before picking himself up and going on. The scenes have a binding motif that is not the same as the more conventional Twelve Stations of the Cross. Nürnberg, Germanisches NationalmuseumĪround the year 1500, the Nürnberg sculptor Adam Kraft (1455/60-1509) created a set of six high reliefs of the Way to Calvary to be placed in the city streets, leading to a free-standing Crucifixion and reliefs of the Lamentation and Entombment. They fulfilled their function only in relation to the behavior of their intended public.Īdam Kraft, The Fifth Fall of Christ on his way from the House of Pilate to Calvary, ca. These were not works of art before which one stood in contemplation or private transport. Corine Schleif spoke about post-medieval Christian street art in Nürnberg and Matthew Martin about an ancien régime porcelain dessert display from the Austrian abbey of Zwettl. ![]() Two particularly fascinating – and moving – talks dealt with ensembles that interacted with groups of people in heavily charged ways. Or a narrower view, as in the immensely intriguing: “Marriage, mourning and martyrdom: the history of an eighteenth-century English bedsheet” ( Sasha Handley). Some were stimulated to take a larger view of things, as in “The art of reading in the Middle Ages: an emotional history of the book” ( Stephanie Downes), and “Impressions: wax and emotions in the Middle Ages” ( Sarah Randles). The speakers did not all talk about the depiction of emotions. ![]() In many cases it was clear that something essential had gone missing in earlier discussions that left emotions out of the equation. Matters that would otherwise have been discussed without reference to the emotions were enlivened and deepened by the attention that was paid to feelings. If forecasters missed out on the election, it is mainly because they have not yet found a way “to understand the long history of emotional behaviours.”Īlthough the talks at the CHE “collaboratories,” as they call them, were classical scholarly presentations on highly specialized subjects, the participants were clearly inspired by the theme of the Centre. Factors of this kind are increasingly being recognized as indispensable to the understanding of consumer behavior, politics and financial trade as well as voting. Even if voters saw Donald Trump for the huckster that he is, many were defenseless against the way he played on their anxieties, apprehensions, desire for approval and aversions, to cite only four emotions beginning with the letter A. I was not the only one skipping out of talks to watch the unlikely election returns in the US. The ARC Centre … uses historical knowledge from Europe, 1100-1800, to understand the long history of emotional behaviours.” The relevance of that approach and the extent to which it is ignored were demonstrated with brutal clarity on the first day of the Adelaide conference. “Emotions shape individual, community and national identities. The mission statement of the CHE is an apparent truth that is nonetheless largely ignored. See the impressive 2016 annual report, with its closing “Key Performance Indicators.” It was founded in 2011 for a period of seven years, at the end of which it is expected to tie up its vast findings in countless fields of the humanities into some kind of integral bundle, with virtual profit at the bottom line. The Centre is actually an extensive project, with five Australian “nodes” and eight foreign partners. The somewhat grandiloquent title makes the Centre (CHE) sound like an institution, but that is not the way the ARC does these things. ![]() Of all the places I might have been on Election Night 2016, none was more appropriate than Adelaide, Australia (where Election Night November 8th did not begin until the morning of November 9th), at the Biennial Research Meeting of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100-1800. Schwartz brings back a progress report on emotion in art. The Australian Research Council (ARC) is funding a project to investigate the effects of emotion on European life in the second millennium. What can be denied, or ignored, is the all-pervasive influence of even low-grade emotion on society and its members. That strong emotions have irresistible power over us is undeniable.
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