Dr. Evan A. Gatti, Assistant Professor of Art History, will present a paper entitled “In a Space Between: Fragmentary Frescoes at Aosta and the Problem of the Middle Ages” at the International Congress on Medieval Art in Kalamazoo Michigan on Sunday, May 11.
Gatti’s paper analyzes the frescoes in “caught” in between the renaissance vaulting and the medieval church of SS. Pietro e Orso in the north Italian town of Aosta. Rather than attempting to reconstruct the cycle, Gatti takes a critical approach to the idea that Aosta and its frescoes are trapped in between. She looks specifically at the frescoes’ depiction of apostolic bodies and city gates, both of which can be read as mediators or as liminal constructs in and of themselves and as they project the passage of pilgrims through Aosta, to and from Rome.
By placing the Aostan programs within the context of their history and historiography, she discusses the ways in which these fresco fragments are ill-defined by what they are not—not St. Georg in Reichenau nor St. Peter’s in Rome, but something in between. As medievalists work to undue the stigma of the “Middle Ages”, Gatti argues, we may have overlooked the possibilities of what it means to be in between.
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/