On the conference topic Β« Senses Β»: The arts and the senses have always been reciprocally related to one another. In the Middle Ages, sensual encounters with art and architecture offered a variety of ways to perceive, comprehend and structure the world. Pledging to relics enclosed in precious reliquaries, incorporating color from Byzantine icons, distinguishing the holy space by swinging polished golden censers, wearing inwardly decorated jewelry on the body or ringing the church bells to make audible the presence of God β such actions leave no doubts about the significance of the senses in the Middle Ages, and furthermore bring to light the role of art within such operations.
For the 6th Forum Kunst des Mittelalters we would like to invite discussions on the role of sensual perception and the interplay of senses in medieval image and object cultures as well as in architecture, including topics from interreligious and cross-cultural perspectives.
The Call for Sessions, which has closed, yielded a large number of proposals concerning the individual senses, as well as proposals which privilege a multisensory and synesthetic approach to art and architecture.
We now invite applicants to submit paper proposals preferably in German or English to these individual sessions. Presentations usually last 20β30 minutes. Please apply with an abstract max. The results of the selection and the programme will be published in the first quarter of at www. Unexamined, touch may strike one as a single directional sensation when human meets object.
It makes only the human, who receives the sensation and explains it. Naturally, objects cannot feel or embody tactility in themselves. As Aristotle taught us so long ago, every animated body is tactile, and touch is the evidence of soul. Moreover, museums, where many of our Byzantine objects reside, keep us exiled from the regime of touch that was deeply embedded in perception and consciousness of all these participants in that historical culture.
