International Medieval Society, Paris • Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2010 - Traditio
Abstract

Transferts et circulations artistiques dans l’Europe de la fin du Moyen Âge : problèmes d’analyse à partir de quelques exemples ibérique, londonien et parisien

Jean-Marie Guillouët, Université de Nantes & INHA

This paper intends to present several directions of investigation revealed by the first steps of a research program Artistic Transfers in Gothic Europe – XIIth-XVIth centuries conducted, since 2009, by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (Paris) and the universities of Liège and Toulouse.

Since a few years, research in medieval art history has acknowledged both the importance and the great range of the mobility of artists, works of art and models during the Middle Ages. However the analysis of those phenomenons has remained too focused on the sole question of the identification of those ciculations. The notion of artistic transfers o artistic inter-exchanges – « transferts artistiques » as they have been called in France and Germany for  two decades – is relevant for art history as it allows to adress the problem in other terms than those of merely artistic influence or reception.

The study of both the careers and the works of “Exogeneous” artists in medieval Europe lead us toward several interogations : What are the consequences of artistic transfers for the careers of artists, their social availability, or their commissions ? What is the significance for exogenous artists of working on commissions far away from their countries of origin ? What are the conditions and the statutory, technical, or fiscal constraints that face such artists ? Do local and imported techniques or know-how coexist or interlock ? What place was assigned to those works in their reception’s place, and at the same time, was the system in which the artists practiced altered by the particular reconfigurations of such transfers ? The difficulty of such analysis first comes from the problem of the status of such artists. Could they be understood as foreign or as migrant players in the artistic scene ? The problem is also to ascertain the structural frontiers such approach requires (linguistic, religious, politic, technical or aesthetic frontiers) and to clearly consider the possible local reorganizations or reconfigurations induced by those artist’s circulations, both in their origin and arrival environment. Through the activity of numerous northern artists (from Picardy or Normandy) in the Iberic Peninsula at the end of Middle Ages or by considering artistic centers such as Paris or London during the same period we can perceive some of the numerous and complicated questions at stake and how they have to be inserted in a social art history.