CPW Premodern Mediterranean Seminar 

Luke A. Fidler

Assistant Professor

Department of Art History

University of Southern California

In 1179, Walter of Châtillon argued that Christ took form in Mary’s womb ut artifex in opere (“like an artist inside his own creation”). His image construes the work of art as the privileged occasion for a powerful, paradoxical rescaling of cause and effect. This talk shows how high-medieval sculptors explored the capacity of aesthetic objects to make miniature worlds that embody and contain more expansive, world-shaping operations by nesting tiny scenes of figural drama in implements whose visual access and tactile manipulation were liturgically regulated. Across the German-speaking lands, narratives staged with figurines (all scaled to the human hand) were secreted in cross and candle bases, portable altars, and eucharistic containers. Attending to this understudied corpus has the potential to reshape disciplinary accounts of the twelfth-century ‘rebirth’ of monumental sculpture. But it also reveals the miniature figure as a philosophical device in period discourse, one that transacted anxieties about magic, sacred matter, and the proliferation of wild forms outside ecclesiastical control.