 Good evening everybody and welcome to our keynote lecture for our graduate student symposium in the history of art. We are delighted to be hosting the symposium and the keynote lecture for the second second year in a row. We kind of inherited it from the Philadelphia Museum of Art last year. My name is Martha Lucy. I am deputy director for research education and interpretation. We are thrilled to have Megan Holmes here as tonight as our keynote speaker. You're going to hear more about her in a few minutes. We have a sort of long chain of introducers tonight, so I won't take too much time. I just want to say welcome. Thank you for coming and please come to the symposium tomorrow. It starts at 10 o'clock. It goes till 4.30 and it's going to be a great day of the sort of newest and freshest research in the field. So let me now introduce Karen Redrobe who is the Elliot and Rosalind Jaffe professor of cinema and modern media and chair of the department of the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania. Thank you so much. I'm just here on behalf of the department of the history of art at Penn to extend a warm welcome to you. It's our turn to host this year. We rotate it and we're really delighted that everybody is here today. I also wanted to welcome Megan Holmes and thank you for coming. We have a very exciting lineup of speakers and I don't want to try your stamina, but I do want to say a few thank yous and also extend another invitation. So first the invitation. After our day of papers tomorrow, Penn would like to invite you to join us at the Arthur Ross gallery on the Penn campus for the opening reception of the exhibition, The World on View. Objects from the Universal Expositions, 1851 to 1914, which is a show curated by our graduate students in a seminar led by Professor Andre Dombrowski. The reception is going to go till 7.30 and Andre tells me there's going to be a lot of wine and cheese. One of the great joys of being in a history of art department is the way that it brings together students, faculty, museum staff of all kinds and members of the general public around the history and experience of objects, sounds, images and thinking. The Philadelphia Graduate Student Symposium has long been a really wonderful catalyst for this kind of gathering and these exchanges are the foundation on which everything else we do rests. I want to express my thanks to the Barnes Foundation and especially to Martha Lucy, Tom Collins, Alia Palumbo and all of the behind the scenes staff who worked to make an event like this possible and also for welcoming us here. I want to thank my colleagues at Temple and Brinmar who are really great collaborators in this event and Michael Laser who does all the hard work on our part along with Darlene Jackson, Libby Saylor, our departmental staff. And I want to thank Professor David Kim and Professor Sarah Guerin who organize our Avery lecture series and that is the series that is sponsoring tonight's lecture with the generous support of Jill and John Avery. The Jill and John Avery Distinguished Lecture Series in the History of Art brings prominent national and international art historians to Penn and to Philadelphia to discuss their recent research. The series includes speakers who cover all aspects of art production in its full global and transhistorical scope and who offer a variety of current methodological perspectives in the history of art. When our faculty met to come up with this year's invitee, we were unanimous in our enthusiasm for inviting Professor Holmes whose work we felt was relevant to people across fields in all kinds of ways. And so I'm now going to invite my colleague David Kim to come and introduce speaker. So thank you. Thank you all for coming on this warm balmy spring day in April and along with my co-organizer and dear friend Sarah Guerin. It's with great pleasure that I welcome all of you and introduce the 2018 Avery lecture. I'm here today with Professor Megan Holmes who is Professor of the History of Art at the University of Michigan but who is now Paul Mellon, Senior Fellow at CASVA for the academic year in Washington D.C. In her two major books and many substantive articles, Professor Holmes raises for the reader or for at least this reader a vexatious if not uncomfortable question. The second thing that is expanding at long last, finally in respect to chronology, geography and media, what place does the Italian Renaissance with a capital A, a capital I, I have to learn how to spell capital I and a capital R have today. Is the Renaissance simply the foundation and foil on and against which other fields define themselves, be they pre-modern or modern or post-modern, western and non-western to speak in the most binary and simplistic of terms? Is the Renaissance now the stockpile of traditional concerns such as elite patronage, princely magnificence or the canon? Or can scholarship in a very subtly radical way lay bare the psychic desires and dismantle the structures of power that constitute the dream and fantasy that is the Renaissance and question its uneasy role in the discipline today? Those who have read Holmes' work know that the response to this last question is not only yes, but yes and. Her first book, Fra Filippo Lippi, the Carmelite Painter at Yale University Press 1999, confronts the myth of a secular and heroic individualism that has informed scholarship on Florence ever since Michelet's and Burkhart's notion of the Renaissance as the discovery of the world and of man. And in this book, Holmes sees the stylistic categories of naturalism and realism, not in terms necessarily of an emergent worldliness, but rather in subtle dialogue with the expectations and aspirations of Carmelite devotion and visionary experience. In a series of articles on money, materials and the market, Holmes mined period contracts and account books to understand the commercial production of Florentine workshops. And in doing so, she conceives these works of art not just as serial production, but as objects that trafficked and frequented in the categories of use value and pleasure value as defined in San Bernardino's economic theory, among others. In her second book, Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence awarded the Arthur Rufus Murray Book Award. Holmes examines the mechanism of quotidian and communal piety, cults, processions and modes of enshrinement, revealing how ritual operates by placing ordinary activities in extraordinary settings or extraordinary activities in ordinary settings. And here we learn that the miraculous image gains force and power when the discontinuity between what should have happened and what happened resolves into what is the case. In her current project, Professor Holmes terms from the holy miraculous to the demonic supernatural, from the artist's brush to the viewer's claw, from the act of painting to the acts of wounding and revealing. This is the dark underside of the Renaissance picture and underside that ironically shows itself on the surface on top. And so we have the fortune this evening to listen to work from this current research in her talk entitled Obdurate Objects and Methodological Challenges, interpreting scratches on Italian panel paintings as indices of period reception. So please join me in welcoming this year's Avery Lecture, Professor Megan Holmes. Thank you very much, David, for that extremely generous and interesting introduction. And I also wanted to thank very much the University of Pennsylvania Department of History of Art for inviting me and the Barnes Foundation. And there's just been wonderful support around the period leading up to the presentation today. So thank you very much. And I apologize for a title that is inelegant and a mouthful. Giorgio Vasari, in his life of Andrea del Castaño, described three different occasions, the scratching of paintings and representational imagery. Following the Vasarian trope of the innately talented youth, who, prior to instruction, endeavors to fashion images with whatever materials are immediately at hand, Castaño, quote, began on walls and on rocks with charcoal or with the point of a knife to scratch and draw animals and figures. This kind of constructive incising of designs with a knife point can be aligned with professional artistic practices and techniques in the period where works of art were scratched or incised into being like copper plate engraving and yellow work seen on the left, exterior fresco painting known as scrafito. And the panel painting technique seen on the right, also called scrafito, where pigment was removed to reveal the underlying gold leaf, emulating rich textiles. Vasari then alludes to two other scratching acts that involved the marking of pre-existing paintings. He mentions how a fresco by Castaño of the flagellation of Christ had not been properly cared for and was scratched and broken, grafiata e guasta by children and other simple-minded people who scratch the heads and arms and most of the bodies of the Jews, as if in this way they would take revenge against them for the injury done to our Lord. Here, Vasari describes an engagement with the pictorial figuration and the narrative subject matter that was destructively literal as a kind of naive form of revenge by unsophisticated people who failed to recognize the operations of Castaño's fresco as masterful artifice. Vasari recounts yet another order of scratching that functioned as a form of artistic valuation. The spirited, resolute Castaño would call out the errors in the paintings made by other artists by signaling them with a scratch of his fingernail, senare col grafio dell'unna. In this case, scratching calls attention to specific features in a pictorial composition as a kind of visual prompt to look carefully here and there and to take note of deficiencies in the mode of picture making. Vasari alludes to a rich visual culture associated with the intentional scratching and marking of works of art and Renaissance Italy. Taking my cue from Vasari, I'm currently working on a book about this culture of scratching where I consider the act of scratching a constructive form of expression or representation. Is there too much echo with this microphone? It's okay. Sorry. I'll do that sentence again. So I'm working on a book about the culture of scratching where I consider the act of scratching a constructive form of expression or representation. Surviving physical and textual evidence suggests that people responded to representational images by marking and modifying their materiality to a much greater extent than is currently acknowledged in the art historical literature and with motivations more varied in nuance than the naivete and literalism implied by Vasari. By making visible and comprehensible these transformative interventions by contemporary viewers, I shed light on an important dimension of the reception history of late medieval and early modern visual art that involve complex cultural understandings about the activation, efficacy and mediation of visual images. This reception history also embraces a broad spectrum of viewers including non-elite members of society who are rarely considered in histories of art written about this period. My focus will be on panel painting because the material properties of this artistic medium which was widely utilized in Renaissance Italy allows one to track the practice of marking and modifying works of art to a greater extent than other media like fresco or sculpture. The wood support, gesso ground, pigments and gold leaf have the capacity to absorb and register the marks of sharp implements so that these marks remain somewhat legible. Material modifications in other media however will be taken into consideration in tracing common practices and divergences and in making use of the excellent scholarship on late medieval and early modern European graffiti and the intentional modifications made by readers to manuscripts in the period. The chronological scope of my study thus begins when panel painting came into use in Italy, circa 1250, and terminates when canvas replaced panel painting as the customary support circa 1550. Works on canvas were scratched too as you can see here in this depiction of the martyrdom of Saint Mark but the visual evidence is much more difficult to assess and these are scratches and we're looking at the head of the individual who's beating Saint Mark on the ground. Most of the scratching and material transformations of panel paintings are not documented and cannot be dated with any precision and this presents a considerable challenge. I have a rich enough corpus however to reveal distinct patterns and features that can be tied to late medieval and early modern cultural attitudes and practices and to related textual evidence. Similar defacement of images is found in other global historical cultures. In the European context there is commonality with the Don Natio Memoriae of ancient Rome and with the early Christian destruction of antique monuments and with Byzantine and Reformation iconoclasm. This phenomena could be productively explored through a cross-cultural comparative anthropology of image defacement. I would argue however that the practice and context within individual historical cultures must be carefully studied first. My evidence suggests that there is indeed a deep and rich history of image defacement and transformation that can be told about late medieval and early modern Italy. In this history presented through the medium of panel painting the practice appears to have been prevalent throughout Italy with the most varied evidence from central Italy where there were burgeoning painting traditions and dynamic mercantile economies that supported diversified production and consumption. The 14th and 15th centuries manifests the greatest incidence, variety and articulacy in the scratching interventions with the 15th century a critical watershed. My study will therefore offer a prehistory for later documented cases of European Reformation iconoclasm. I want to call particular attention to my methodology since this is a graduate symposium and you are thinking self-consciously about method in your own work, but also because this project is so outside the box within my field of Italian Renaissance art history as David alluded. I had already become casually curious about panel scratching years ago ever since I had run into these two photographs here in a photo archive in Florence taking during the restoration of a painting. The conservators after removing later over paint discovered that the eyes of both the Madonna and Christ child had at some point in time been scraped down to the Gesso ground. I decided three years ago to conduct systematic research and began making my way through major collections of Italian panel paintings and seeking out work still in situ looking for examples. During this period, this phase of the project, which I referred to as the hunting and gathering phase, I tried to be as open-minded as possible. Sort of anything went. I didn't look for certain things. It was a panel painting I took it on. And the results were profoundly interesting and quite unexpected. For starters, I found that when utilizing my standard habits of viewing and art historical research approaches, these scratches were virtually invisible. They did not appear in publications, in reproductions, visual analysis and even in catalog entries on the panels themselves. And often I wouldn't see the scratches myself when standing before the paintings and museums and churches unless I was purposefully looking for them, usually too close to the paintings for museum guard comfort or crouching down off to the side trying to catch raking light on the surface. But even then, the scratches were not always visible. Modern-day viewing conditions are frequently at a distance and hands off, preventing one from getting close enough to a painting. Other impediments include heavy restoration, reflective modern varnish, glass covering the panels and poor lighting conditions. I have, nonetheless, built up a considerable corpus of over 250 examples and have established a database of sorts. There's an intriguing range in the modes of scratching and in the implied tools that must have been used to make the marks. There are gouges, scrapes, incisions and blows, some applied with evident force and others with a lighter hand with more control and precision. There's a range too in the kinds of subjects and motifs that are singled out for marking across a wide variety of pictorial genres and formats. These subjects and motifs include portraits and coats of arms, sensual seductive bodies, protagonists and secular narratives and domestic imagery, politically charged subjects, animals, imagery related to demons and sorcery, representations of classical antique idols, monks and members of the clergy, non-Christian others, foreigners, beggars and disabled people, sacred figures and altarpieces and devotional panels, and the faces and limbs of the antagonists in religious narratives. And that's the category that we just saw in one of the paintings in the Barnes collection. One of the biggest surprises has been the number of panel paintings where Christ the Virgin and Saints exhibit scratching, as you can see here. Other surprises were the many works by major artists like Piero della Francesca and Botticelli. While some of these scratching acts were clearly meant to damage and deface the imagery, others are more constructive and affirmative, including devotional gestures like the cross incised on the bodies of the sacred figures, akin to making the cross in the air with one's hand but leaving a visible mark. Here you see instances where the pictorial medium has been selectively removed, the ultramarine of the Virgin's robe on the left, which may have been scraped off for reuse given its value and the half figure of Saint San Bernardino Bernadino on the right. There may also have been charismatic properties ascribed to the materials of sacred depiction, whereby they were removed here for curative or protective use. It is difficult to find evidence of devotional touch and this kind of good luck contact seen here, where people in Bergamo today touch the testicles of the bronze Collioni family arms, but I do keep an eye out for signs of what archaeologists call use swear and of repurposing. My method has been to privilege the best examples within the different genres of panel painting and subjects represented. I then excavate around these exemplary cases, consulting museum curatorial and conservation files when possible, and conducting research related to the specific historical context. For example, this portrait in the Louvre by Piero della Francesca of Sigismundo Maletesta, the controversial ruler of Rimini, has scratches on the sensory organs, the eyes, there's a X through the eye here, and then the nose, there's a line that cuts across the nostril, there's a line that cuts across the mouth. There's another kind of mark on the ear implying a staccato jab by a blunt object perhaps comparable to a boxing of the ear or a plugging of the ear hole. There are two relevant historical contexts for the defacing of this panel. While we do not know where the portrait was initially displayed, we do know of other representations of Sigismundo Maletesta that were intentionally damaged. Pope Pius II, enraged by the autonomy and comportment of a ruler who was technically under papal authority as a governor within the papal states, officially excommunicated Sigismundo and had three effigies burned before the public in Rome. In a further carnivalized act of humiliation, Pius declared the still living Sigismundo solemnly canonized in hell, joining the damned and other devils. The small cuts and jab to the animating features of Sigismundo and Piero della Francesca's painting could have functioned as a similar kind of assassination and effigy and the tradition of classical Danatio Memoriae. The painting also reveals a more assertive, repetitive mode of scratching on the top of the head. The subject's family name Maletesta literally means bad head or headache. The scratcher's gesture directed toward the head, in addition to being quite amusing, may also have been intended to activate a variety of visual punning that was practiced in portraiture at the time, with a well-known example Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra da Benci, where the sitter is set against a Juniper bush playing on her name Ginevra, which is similar to the vernacular Tuscan for the word Juniper. This particular mode of defacement, where the facial features associated with sensation and animation are disfigured, appears frequently in my corpus, in portraits, sacred images and narratives, in domestic secular art, and extends even to imagery of animals, as can be seen here on the right, where the eyes of the lion accompanying Saint Jerome have been both cut and scraped. While still on the subject of my methodology, I want to focus briefly on the critical issue of interpreting the surface of the panel paintings. While I have always been interested in materials, techniques and condition, this is a case where the stakes are high, and I really need to understand what I am seeing when I evaluate the paint and gesso layers. I need to be confident that I can, with a reasonable margin of error, distinguish between deliberate markings and other modifications to the surface that can occur over the roughly 600-year histories of these panel paintings. As a consequence, I have tested my observations and hypotheses in conversation with painting conservators and have benefited considerably from their expertise. Here is an example where two conservators, whom I consulted separately, nixed my interpretation of this notable disturbance in the panel surface as an intentional blow to the ear of the Saint. I had been delighted by the juxtaposition with the damage in the area of the ear, and the adjacent text in the painting that commands the nuns to listen audite. This was my introduction to knotholes, and I have since become fairly good at recognizing them. A dialogue with conservators is also critical to my project because I am essentially trying to reveal what conservators, by profession, are compelled to conceal, or at least to tidy up when they make paintings display worthy in the museum and church settings. This painting of the Madonna and Child with the Temptation of Eve in the Cleveland Museum of Art, which could be the poster child for my project, is an unusual case where the decision was made when the painting was restored in 1981 not to paint over and conceal the deep scratches on the body of Eve. The conservation objective, according to the report in the museum file, was, quote, to minimize the distraction of the damages without falsifying the physical history of this work. The museum label even calls attention to this physical history, quote, the deep scratches on the surface of the panel, especially on the serpent's face and Eve's wrist, result from a zealous Christian symbolic attack on the power of evil. This order of explanation, however, is rather complicated by the fact that the scratches appear too on the coat of arms of the patron, on the bodies of both the virgin and child, and on the face of Archangel Michael. Important for my working method is the fact that there are similar scratching patterns found on other paintings in my corpus, including one that exhibits very similar iconography. In this small devotional panel of roughly the same date, but from another region of Italy, there are scratches on the face of the serpent and some paint loss on the figure of Eve, particularly on the hands. Furthermore, I have numerous examples of this particular mode of scratching the body of an antagonist in Christian religious imagery. A body part connected with an act or gesture that had negative dire consequences is singled out. Eve's hand that plucked the fruit from the tree of knowledge, the arm of the Roman prefect signaling the order to torture San Amplonia on the right. Those body parts are severed, with single or multiple parallel cuts effectively dismembering them. This mode of disciplining representational bodies has been connected in the scholarship on Reformation iconoclasm to punishments exacted through the criminal justice system on the actual bodies of the condemned, where hands and feet were cut off, either with a direct connection to a specific crime involving the particular limb, or as a more general form of corporeal torture, punishment, and shaming. There are numerous examples in my corpus where hands and feet are effectively severed from bodies by precise incisions. And here I'm going to show you a detail in a moment, but I just want you to see the full Pradella. First of all, the face of this figure who's ordering the torment, actually, of Santa Reparata, has been defaced. This torture has been defaced, and then I'm going to call attention to the little cuts that are made right at the ankles of these figures here. And there you can see them, very precise across the bodies. Ultimately, my findings should offer painting conservators a synchronic cultural history of a phenomenon that they encounter frequently, but often register in a generic way, making a distinction between damage that is deliberate and damage that is caused by wear and tear and improper handling. Vandalism is the term that is usually used to characterize deliberate scratching in conservation reports, curatorial object descriptions, and in the rare references in scholarly publications. Dario Gamboni has convincingly argued in his seminal book, The Destruction of Art, Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution, that it is in our best interest as art historians to interrogate and put pressure on the term vandalism and its operations as applied to visual art. He calls attention to the origins of the word associated with the vandal said to have been a marauding Germanic tribe that sacked Rome in the 5th century. Vandal was already used pejoratively in English beginning in the early 17th century to imply barbaric conduct, and there is a parallel earlier usage of Ostrogoth by Vasari in his account of the loss of classical art and technical knowledge with the destruction of ancient Rome. The term vandalism first appeared, however, in the 18th century in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution. Gamboni argues that vandalism always carries negative associations of a barbaric, mindless attack positioned against a positive valuation of the civilized and civilizing appreciation of culture and cultural patrimony. Recent scholarship on iconoclasm and graffiti and current debates about cultural heritage offer productive alternative ways to conceptualize intentional damage within visual culture. Stacey Boldrick and Richard Clay refer in the plural to iconoclasms across historical cultures and geographies. They use the term self-consciously aware of its genesis and fraught history, but consider it, as does Gamboni, more neutral than vandalism. Image breakage is shown to operate in a dialectical relationship between destruction and construction with the facement calling attention to that which has been damaged or removed, reinforcing the very power of the image in the process. These scholars explore the motivations and power relations underlying image breakage and the responses to it in a more historical manner, and not just during moments of conquest or the heightened antagonism between proponents of opposing religions or during regime changes. Iconoclasm can be an articulate form of social and political protest. Gamboni approaches iconoclasm as, quote, a set of possibilities to which each concrete situation gives a different shape and meaning. Bruno Latour notes the ambiguity underlying the intentions and acts of image destruction in the domains of art, science, and religion, and proposes the term iconoclash to reflect the unintended effects and reverberations set in motion when representations come under attack. There are significant changes of meaning when works of art are damaged, and many works continue to have active afterlives in their modified states. Richard Clay describes a fluid, kinetic semeosis, ongoing processes of discursive sign transformation that precede a company and proceed from moments of physical breaking. Working closer to my time period and geographical region, the period that I'm focusing on, Michael Camille and Kate Rudy have studied the intentional defacing of images and the useware in late medieval European manuscripts. These erasures, as Michael Camille refers to them, are very specific to the medium, the parchment page, where painted features were intentionally removed with a scraping knife or a little saliva and finger rubbing, leaving blank areas of paint loss or holes in the page. The genitals of Adam have been erased in this illumination. Camille argues that these deliberate and localized transformations should be interpreted not as acts of vandalism, but as acts of representation. They are glosses to the multiple meanings of the never finished, always open texts. He considers the 15th century to mark a change in scopic regimes, moving toward a more authoritarian, modern policing of the gaze and a culture of shame and modesty. Christopher Hoyer also uses a literary metaphor in referring to 16th century iconoclasm in northern Europe as a kind of editing of the imagistic content by Protestant image breakers. Ultimately these scholars propose a less inflammatory and more neutral definition of iconoclasm. In the words of Boldrick, iconoclasm involves the infringement of the physical integrity of culturally significant images and objects. Barry Flood, however, pushes to keep the discussion of iconoclasm closely aligned with an insistent critique of ideological investments in valuations of art and cultural heritage and the history and global politics of heritage preservation. This scholarship on iconoclasm opens rich possibilities for the interpretation of panel scratching in Italy, circa 1250 to 1550, understood as constructive embodied acts. The scratches on panel paintings effectively disrupted the discrete relationship between professional artists working contractually for specific patrons and custodial institutions. The paintings, once installed in their settings, became accessible to wider publics and users who acted directly upon them and transformed their material and representational properties and ultimately their meanings. Scratching acts responded to pictorial imagery and narrative construction. Verbal commentary was added and dramatic storylines were interrupted, redirected or brought to narrative resolution. Retribution against those who tortured Christ and the saints was taken into the viewer's hands. Political figures were brought down in effigy, shamed and violated through the scoring of their name and family arms. In Joseph Kerner's words, people responded to the image, not against it. In spite of this enabling recent scholarship on iconoclasm, I am opting not to use the term. Iconoclasm can be too distracting when working on late medieval and early modern visual culture. The word is too readily associated with a legacy of Byzantine iconomachia and Protestant reformation attacks on sacred images. The word also seems too bounded by its etymological roots, conveying negation, breakage and undoing, and inadequate therefore to cover the range of markings and contexts in my corpus of scratched Italian panel paintings. I want to turn now to the scratches and transformative marks themselves and to the related embodied scratching acts and consider the capacity for the marks to operate elusively and metaphorically as representation. These markings reveal commonalities with long-standing traditions of wall graffiti. In this regard, panel paintings were surfaces and people in the period wrote on and marked surfaces in churches, homes, taverns, streets and in other social spaces. And I'm showing you here period graffiti from the crypt of the Siena Cathedral on the left and from a Florentine townhouse on the right. These examples of Italian graffiti manifest a range of different systems and modes of marking, subjects represented, levels of draftsmanship and domains of cultural knowledge and literacy. The visual mode is characterized by linearity, gridding, repetition, transformative relational elements and visual ciphers with polyvalent meanings. There are accounting tallies, Roman numeral sequences, simple crosses and more elaborate geometric designs and figures. Identity is expressed individually and collectively through names, personal emblems and family coats of arms. Important events affecting the community are recorded, deaths, poor harvests, plague, war. In the Siena Cathedral crypt, there is also musical notation, including what are known as Guadonian hands seen on the left. These hands here, and this is the most characteristic of this phenomena. Guadonian hands that functioned as visual aids from ancient times. Guadonian hands that functioned as visual aids from memorizing notes and hexachord relationships, suggesting that this area was used for choral instruction. We can see how some of these graffiti practices migrated to panel paintings. Here on the left I'm showing you wall graffiti where a date recording a death has been inscribed in a church chapel and on the right on a panel painting is a fragmentary date which reads On the 15th day of Lu, probably Lulio, the month of July. And here are examples from various panel paintings of numbers and tallies, a star, a half circle made with a compass and abbreviated linear design. So these are sort of examples of graffiti type notation that slide into panel painting. Panel paintings, however, were not routinely marked with such a wide array of incisions as wall graffiti. The discrete boundedness of panel paintings within their frames, raised moldings, tabernacles and furniture settings seems to have been a factor in limiting graffiti habits of incising personal marks and insignia and accounting notation. In the case of panels that were incorporated into altarpieces, there seems, not surprisingly, to have been a perceived hierarchy of church space in terms of appropriate surfaces for inscription. The framing operations of panel paintings too seem to have distinguished these painted wooden surfaces as sites of figural and narrative exposition and elicited a different form of perception that activated the pictorial subjects and figuration. Here is an example, for instance, on this panel where you see the typical graffiti practice of reiteration, repeating a schematic motif, in this case an arrow inscribed in the left and right. So here's one arrow here and then kind of two little arrows right next to each other here. But the motif has been picked up from the painted attribute of Saint Sebastian and the repetition may have served a talismanic purpose to give Saint Sebastian's role as one of the preeminent protectors against the arrows of plague. In this panel by Sassetta, someone inscribed in the vernacular the phrase, Saint Anthony, beaten by devils, naming the saint depicted in the painting above, in the narrative seen above. Veronique Plesche, who has studied 16th century graffiti on religious frescoes in churches in northern Italy offers a compelling means of conceptualizing graffiti inscriptions laid across or near the bodies of saints. She eloquently argues, the graffiti tangibly bear witness to a physical interaction with the images and this interaction is devotional in nature, for it bears the hope that through the marks of the hope, the holy figure will be reached. Thanked for good things, a good harvest, or begged for protection from bad things, war, natural disasters, etc. This interaction does not stop at the surface of the images, for here we have graffiti in the etymological sense of the term, from grafiade to scratch. The very active incising goes further away from the scriptural, and into the world of the painting, the world of the saint. It is a fully meaningful choice that reaches deep into the saint's pictorial flesh. In the panel by Sassetta that we just looked at, the figures of the devils, too, have been scratched, particularly their bodily orifices, including their genitals and bums, their genitals and their bum faces. And so I'm going to show you some of them. The paint has been chipped away down to an unusual underlying layer of gold leaf, on which the artist himself had scratched a schematic drawing of the diabolical anatomy to guide him later when painting over the gold. While Veronique Plesche emphasizes the devotional motivation for graffiti acts, there may also be some of the works of the artist, while Veronique Plesche emphasizes the devotional motivation for graffiti acts, there may also have been an apotrapeic intent behind the naming and the disfigurement here, designed to ward off evil associated with demonic agency and to prevent the possibility of real diabolical spirits inhabiting these painted devil images and operating in and through them. One of the most common forms of scratching found on panel paintings is the marking of the bodies of the antagonists in Christian narrative imagery, like the devils in this panel. The humanist Pierre Paolo Vergerio, in a letter of 1397, described such acts of disfigurement as motivated by great piety and belief, but with some skepticism regarding the true religious merit of such acts. He wrote, Those who, when they see in churches images of Jews and Gentiles, either flagellating or crucifying Christ, they gouge out their eyes so that they seem angrier, and they disfigure the cruel faces of the guards out of great belief and piety, as if indeed merit in life would be achieved by means of the destruction of the images and not more through the remission of sins and acquiring virtues. It seems we believe that images of Pharaoh, Pilate, and Herod, as well as evil demons with all of the horror painters could give them, should be expelled from temples and erased from walls. This practice of defacing the antagonists in religious narrative painting had a precedent in wall graffiti, but it is not the distinguishing characteristic of wall graffiti, given that narrative cycles on walls were often elevated and more difficult to reach. In panel paintings, placed on altars, narrative was more accessible. The scenes that were scratched were typically those located in the lower lateral sections of early altarpieces, as can be seen on the left, and then later on in the lateral sections of what is known as the predella zone of the base of the altarpiece, seen on the right, and that's this zone here which comes into being beginning in the 14th century rather. So after the predella was introduced in the 14th century, that this becomes one of the primary places where you find narrative and altarpieces. If we focus in on the marks themselves, we can see how they articulately engage with the pictorial imagery and narrative. Some of the marks call attention to their own making and establish visual analogies with scratching and cutting implements and tools. In doing so, they mobilize a visual rhetoric of disfigurement that is aligned with the linguistic meanings of the various terms in the period that were used to describe acts of marking and modifying images. Grafio or scratch is the term used by Vasari when writing about the artist Castanio. In legal prescriptions against damaging sacred images, we see a more violent language, the Latin percutere to strike or pierce and maculare to mark or stain, and Italian cavare locchio to gouge out or scratch out the eye. One can imagine a perception of scratching in terms of artisanal terminology for sharpness or cutting in taliatura or a sort of penetrative cutting into incisione. The marking of this late 14th century Florentine painting of the Massacre of the Innocence engages with the concept of scratching, grafiare. The marks play off the more common period associations of scratching as an intimate corporeal act where fingernails relieve an irritating itch or aggressively maim another body and leave an imprint on the skin. In the narrative scene, desperate mothers attack the soldiers who are killing their babies with what little resource they have at their disposal, their fingernails, the women's claw at the faces of the soldiers drawing blood visible as red rivulets that stream down their foreheads and cheeks. In this detail, the represented bloody red scratches on the forehead of the soldier have been complimented and amplified by scratching his eye out. And these are scratch marks that were painted on and then it's a little hard to see here, but this eye has been scratched. In the charged narrative vignette of the kiss of Judas in an altarpiece representing Christ as a man of sorrows with passion imagery, a concentric indentation, right there, indexes a forceful blow made by a blunt object, perhaps a staff or mallet or the handle of a work tool. In the interactive layered, interactive layered representational economy of the acted upon altarpiece. However, the concentric recess marking the cheek of Judas is positioned close to the hammer that was used to drive the nails into the hands and feet of Christ. This manner of mark making implies the activation of emotions and physical force in the devotional engagement of the viewer. And I have multiple examples in my corpus of images of Judas that have been disfigured. In this instance, Judas' betrayal is avenged and the pain and suffering inflicted on Christ during the crucifixion are countered according to the Old Testament judicial logic of equivalences. Here represented as a hammer blow for a hammer blow. In this altarpiece Pradella by Giovanni di Paolo representing the last judgment there is extensive scratching on the figures of the demons and the sinners in hell. On the right you can see that this female sinner consigned to an infernal domain for those who committed carnal sins and lust was painted with an adjacent demon prodding her with a skewer. In the reception of the altarpiece a beholder forcefully reenacted this demonic punishment for a carnal sin by making a deep actual gash into the woman's vagina. And that is seen here. It's a little below. In this scene of the betrayal of Christ on this altarpiece the scratching is represented as a form of knife cutting. In the painted representation St. Peter attacks Malchus the servant of Caiaphas with a knife poised to cut off his ear. There's a remarkable light scratch visible which dents rather than scores the paint layer extending from the knife blade across the ear effectively completing the slicing action. This scratch also references its own manufacture as a knife cut albeit a knife with a rather dull blade. There's another remarkable response in the marking of this altarpiece that operates like a textural gloss. There's fairly systematic damage to the eyes of the antagonists across the altarpiece which have been gouged out and repaired by restorers with smooth putty infill. And you can see here that these eyes have pretty much been systematically gouged. Note here though in this detail from the lamentation on the far right side of the docile uniquely two haloed figures, two of the Mary's lamenting the death of Christ have also had their eyes gouged out but just one eye has been removed and it is the right eye of each woman. This painting originally stood on an altar in a rural church attached to a convent of Franciscan male friars. I wonder whether these strategically marked Mary's one of whom may signify as Mary Magdalene, the reformed prostitute whether they are activating Christ's admonition against looking lustfully at a woman from the Sermon on the Mount. In Christ's words from the scriptural passage in Matthew quote, you have heard that it was said that you shall not commit adultery but I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, goug it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. This unexpected gouging of just the single eye prompts viewers to shift perceptual registers to disengage from the drama of the passion narrative and to use the marked Mary's to reflect upon looking lustfully and committing adultery within the heart. I will close this section on scratching marks and acts with this striking example of Don Natio Memoriae drawing your attention to the deliberateness and the thoroughness of the execution. The panel depicts Giuliano Davanzatti, the Florentine commander of the garrison forces and occupied Pisa in 1436 to 37, kneeling before a crucifix with the cityscape of Pisa visible beyond the wall. The painting was probably commissioned by Davanzatti at the end of his tenure for display in the garrison headquarters just outside the city following the genre of devotional and heraldic imagery commissioned by governors and vickers of subject territories to commemorate their time in office. The Florentine occupation of Pisa endured through the 15th century with persistent tension and one major rebellion. So Giuliano Davanzatti in the painting has had his eye bludgeoned and gouged. Each individual letter of his name was struck through. His personal motto was scraped to illegibility. The defacing of the lion rampant on the Davanzatti arms was so extreme that the gesso was compromised, exposing an underlying layer of fabric. Even the iconic tower of Pisa was attacked with a figural slash probably directed against Florentine control over the Bishops sea in Pisa as well as the government. Then the arms of the city of Pisa were superimposed in the lower left corner of the panel at the same time that Davanzatti and his insignia were entirely concealed. Possibly between 1494 and 1509 when Pisa briefly regained independence. The original composition, or it's also possible that there was so much compromise to the figures that it was overpainted at a later moment. But at any rate, the original composition was recovered during restoration in the 1980s. In the time, oops, let me go back. In the time remaining, I want to give an abbreviated demonstration of the deeper historical work of my study, how I am going about situating and contextualizing the scratching of different types of imagery within different social domains and in relation to cultural practices and discourses. Here are some of the subjects that I will be exploring in and across the book chapters. So scratching acts and the culture of Scrafito, Devil's Diabolical Agency and the Inspiriting of Images, Animacy, Magic and Superstition, Domnatio Memoriae and Political Conflict, Secular Imagery on Domestic Furniture, Changing Valuations about Visual Art and Artistic Heritage, Violent and Punitive Engagement with Religious Narrative on Altarpieces, Sacred Images, Blasphemy and Miraculous Image Colts. I'll make just a brief foray into this last topic, looking at the deliberate scratching of sacred images in churches. I'm going to feature this early 14th century Sienese Marian Altarpiece that was deliberately defaced. Before I begin my analysis, however, I need to step back briefly. The Altarpiece as a type of panel painting is critical to my study since many of the examples of scratching are either on Altarpieces or parts of now dismantled Altarpieces that were once displayed in churches. The history that I am telling is therefore also a history of Altarpiece design, devotional address and behavior before and in this photograph and on Altarpieces, and the access that the public would have had to Altarpieces. These scratching acts would have occurred when the altars were not being used in religious services, when the Altarpieces were sites for a kind of extra liturgical devotional engagement for people circulating in the churches. Altarpiece scratches I would maintain was, Altarpiece scratching I would maintain was neither secretive nor transgressive. To borrow historian Juliet Fleming's characterization of early modern graffiti, the scratching was quote, commonplace and unremarkable. It can even be found on Altarpieces that once stood above the high altars of the cathedrals in Florence, Siena and Venice. And here I'm showing you Duccio's Maestà from the high altar of the Siena Cathedral and there are a number of the Pradella panels that have scratching on them and also some of the narrative panels, but the one that I'm showing you is the Temptation of Christ from the Pradella on the back. This scene right here, I'm showing you the top of it. This is the Pradella that was on the backside of the Altarpiece and I'll show you enlargement. The devil has been repeatedly scored with a sharp implement. You can see even the finger, the pointing finger has been cut. To emphasize my point about scratching acts not being secretive or done on the sly when the resident clergy was absent or inattentive, I'll use the example of this fresco. The busy demons in the Hellscape of Giotto's Last Judgment and the arena chapel have been extensively scored with their gruesome tortures turned back upon their own hairy pelts. To reach this portion of the fresco, located about, I think it's over 10 feet up on the right side of the wall, a ladder would have been necessary. I imagine, particularly in the case of demons, that the clergy themselves may even have been involved in these scratching interventions. In the history that I'm telling, the painted wooden Altarpiece as a site for this kind of tactile, performative, transformative, devotional response became available circa 1250 as panel paintings gradually began to populate altars and altars in turn began to proliferate within the nave and transept of churches in Italy. The site amplified in the 14th and 15th centuries and then was somewhat reduced in the early 16th century through changes in the design of new altar pieces that were installed in churches. Circa 1500, altar pieces became significantly taller in case within massive classical antique-style framing structures. There was an increasing monumentality in the scale of the represented figures with greater narrative explication within the main panel of the unified altar image. These changes can be seen in this painting of a church interior by Carpaccio, dated around 1512. With the older and newer types of altar pieces juxtaposed. So this represents the older type and this represents the newer type. There was also a new tendency to elevate the altar piece to a much greater extent by introducing additional tiers within the base and stairs leading up to the altar. The altar pieces were also sometimes set back into recesses within the wall and closed off within chapels by gates made of metal or stone. And interestingly, the historiated narrative predella, the most commonly scratched feature in altar pieces in the 15th century, disappeared. The net effect of these changes was to make the altar piece significantly less physically accessible to people moving about the church space with a different order of visual engagement that involved apprehension from a distance and from a lower vantage point. During the decades leading up to the period of Catholic reform in Italy, there was a kind of privatization of the altar space with the altar piece more tightly aligned with the liturgical needs of the patrons and the devotional services offered by the clergy with hands-off viewing at a distance available to the wider public. Let us turn back now to the early 14th century Sienese altar piece and I will lead you rather like a forensic scientist through a careful analysis of the scratches. The altar piece was originally located above an altar in the church of San Lorenzo in the city of Siena. The church was attached to a Franciscan nunnery and the iconography in the polyptych corresponds with this Franciscan institutional setting with St. Francis on the outer left and St. Clair on the outer right. It is not known whether the altar piece was utilized by the nuns or by the laity, although patterns of monastic patronage and urban settings at this time and the spatial separation of devotional space in nunneries make it probable that it was the laity, that the laity were the primary viewers here. In this history of altar piece scratching that I presented, the painting would have been available to people circulating within the church from the early 1300s on during the phase of the greatest accessibility of the altar area. The altar piece bears evidence of the intentional scratching of certain of the figures, possibly done at one time or on multiple occasions. I'll begin with the figures that are most extensively marked. St. Clair, situated to the far right of the main register and the bishop saint in the upper left gable. Each has been scratched repeatedly with a sharp blade, probably a knife. The linear cuts can be distinguished from the irregular pattern of cracklure with some cuts so deep and wide that they were later filled in with putty and painted over during the restoration of the altar piece. In the case of St. Clair, the individual cuts are extended diagonal and horizontal blade marks. This late 19th century photograph of the panel, where the deeper and more extended cuts are quite evident, suggests that the incisions were probably made by a person or by more than one person on different occasions, standing to the right of the altar and reaching over with the right hand to make straight diagonal cuts that run from the upper right to the lower left of the panel, intersected by this long arching left-to-right cut. So these are the cuts that are made sort of from a right-handed person standing to the right and then there's this one intersecting cut that comes down like this. I'm going to project now a PowerPoint slide where I have accentuated on a photograph that I took, the cuts with yellow lines to render them more visible. This is the overall coverage or kind of entrapment of the face in this net of intersecting diagonal lines. A different order of cut, however, a horizontal incision targets the area of the eyes, probably made by reaching across the panel and drawing the implement sharply inward. The pattern of scratches across the face of the bishop is somewhat different, a function of the higher placement of the figure and its location on the left side of the altar. The cuts are seemingly made by the person standing to the left of the altar and repeatedly drawing the blade or tip of the sharp implement directly down with the longest cut angling somewhat to the left toward the person wielding the implement. Two of the cuts run through the eyes, including one of the two diagonal incisions, perhaps implying, again, a concerted effort to reach these vital sensory organs. If we move to the central section of the altar piece, something rather different has occurred. To see one feature in particular, the Christ Child's mouth has been subjected to extensive scratching, including a horizontal cut that runs right across the opening between the two lips. More intrusive physical exertion would have been required here than in the marking of the lateral figures. The scratcher would have had to lean across the altar and reach upward to mark this feature, located about 40 centimeters from the base of the polyptych. And here is the virgin, located above the other saints in her central position and larger scale. The disturbance of the paint surface here is difficult to interpret in the aftermath of the restoration with areas of paint loss around the eyes. There is also a vertical line that runs through the virgin's mouth, which may have been intentional, but again, it's difficult to say. There's a relevant early modern period perspective where the defacement of sacred images was considered a form of blasphemy. As has been explored in the work of Giles Constable and William Connell, featuring the case of Antonio Rinaldeschi, who threw horse tongue at an image of the virgin in 1501 seen here. In late medieval Italy, blasphemy was loosely defined as verbal swearing and physical gestures that were considered to be insulting or disrespectful to God, the virgin, and saints, usually triggered by irrational, unbridled anger. Blasphemy was prosecuted predominantly through the secular courts in accordance with criminal law following the communal statutes of local governments. Around the middle of the 15th century, the statutes in Italy were modified to include visual images. The earliest example that I have found dates to 1438 from the town of Porto Nonne, northeast of Venice. The Latin statute reads, if a person has in disdain destroyed, marked, broken, or disparaged in any other way, painted or sculpted figures of omnipotent God himself and the glorious virgin mother of Mary or other male saints or female saints, this person will be condemned to pay six lira and ten soldi. The language for damaging or attacking sacred images across these statutes in different regions varies and gives us an expansive lexicon of destructive physical acts and descriptive terminology. The 1526 statutes of the Umbrian town Norcia, for example, specify the gouging of the eye of a sacred figure and the striking of the figure with arms or similar implements, so as to cause injury. The 1545 redaction of the Sienese statutes describes striking, spitting at, or throwing filth at sacred images with the penalty significantly higher for figures of Christ, the Virgin, and the Cross, the amputation of the right hand and perpetual exile, while for images of saints there was a mere monetary fine, 100 lira and 50 soldi. Capital punishment was rare and at the discretion of the judicial authorities. I want to be very careful about how I apply blasphemy to the practice of panel scratching. There is little evidence of extensive prosecution for the defacement of images, although example could be made of individual transgressors and there was certainly a rise in miraculous image cults triggered by acts of blasphemy at this time. Most of the documented cases involved gamblers and did not transpire within churches, but rather in exterior urban or peripheral spaces directed at frescoed sacred images that were displayed on roadside tabernacles or exterior walls. Furthermore, the generalized notion of injury and dishonor associated with blasphemy enacted while in the grips of irrational anger cannot adequately account for markings like these that are so varied, nuanced and particularized and that suggest complex and multiple motivations behind these acts of sacred defacement. This kind of panel scratching in contrast with the behaviors referenced in the prescript of blasphemy laws, I would argue, reveal a more fluid and permissive religious culture. These scratches are evidence of religion at the level of lived experience, the everyday, indexing an interpersonal relationship between the scratcher and the figure sacred beings. This interpersonal relationship involved reciprocal needs and expectations, conventionalized forms of address and propitiation and ways of accommodating heightened emotions and resolving conflicts and ruptures. In this Franciscan ecclesiastical setting where this altarpiece was displayed, this may have been a case where these specific saints failed to perform when petitioned in time of need and it is telling that the face is, the face, it is telling that the Franciscan saint Claire in the main register has been targeted. Another possibility given the defacement of a monastic and an episcopal saint is that Rancor was being expressed against the related institutions. The scratching of the mouth of the Christ child could be linked to the role of the mouth as the locus of speech or a sensory organ or as the bodily orifice through which vitalizing breath passes. The mouth too could be the means of proclaiming the possibilities of sacred painting as animate in live in presence or conversely for decrying the limitations of the mute theological sign. The literal opening up of Christ's mouth and parting of the lips could have been an injunction to Christ to speak or a clever entreaty. Lord, open your lips. Domine la vietua a peries inverting the prayer that initiated the monastic and domestic hours. Lord, open my lips and my mouth will announce your praise. If these markings were intended as a show of disrespect on the part of the scratcher, then perhaps Gerhard Schwerhoff's scholarly work on the late medieval, early modern culture of swearing can be applied here. Schwerhoff observes how blasphemy was an everyday speech act that was part of a competitive masculine culture in which power and independence were asserted. We can modify this notion to accommodate a church setting and the devotional address of male and female devotees directed at the holy figures themselves. Can we not then see these scratching interventions as an impassioned assertion of individual agency and desire within a longer-term, personalized interrelationship between the devotees and these scratch beings represented in the imagery? So I'm just suggesting a longer-term relationship that has these different moments that can include anger, rupture. Whoopsie. I don't know what that means. Should I do something? Okay, I think I'll just speak. I'm getting to the end. So I expect to that there was a period script for repentance and reparation on the part of the devotee and the recuperation of the image for quotidian devotional use that could even involve restoration when necessary that did not resort to extreme solutions of public denouncement and punishment. Nonetheless, the new practice in Italy, beginning in the mid-15th century, affolding acts that dishonored and injured sacred images into the communal blasphemy statutes had implications for the practice of scratching panel paintings. There was a potential by association to characterize negatively, even criminalize and demonize what I am arguing was a widespread and varied practice of scratching and marking the imagery and panel paintings. In this way, this performative mode of expression became conflated with the extreme behaviors and activities associated with blasphemy, behaviors like, and here I am going to quote from various blasphemy statutes, behaviors like making the thicka which is the equivalent of giving the finger, making the thicka in the name of a saint or swearing on the blood of Christ, the virgin's milk and all of the external body parts including the culo, ass and the pota, cunt of God, Christ and the virgin. Blasphemy, like the modern day terms vandalism and iconoclasm is an ideologically motivated and opportunistic word when deployed in the Renaissance period. Dario Gomboni has argued in regard to vandalism that it be seen as a situational term and that we should be asking when might an act directed at an image be labeled vandalism and why. The same I would argue should be applied to the blasphemy label in the Renaissance. Rather than accepting and adopting ourselves the label blasphemy and sacrilege to characterize this kind of marking on sacred images we should be asking instead when and why the act of image defacement might be labeled blasphemy. Why sacred images were incorporated into the blasphemy statutes beginning in the mid 15th century and what the broader implications of this are for the history of art and visual culture in this period leading up to the eruption of confessional debates about the use and efficacy of images during the Protestant Reformation and Catholic reform in Europe. Dante in the Inferno classifies blasphemy as a kind of violence against God, against both the person of God and against God's possessions which Dante defines as nature and art. What we might be observing here is a contestation over the possessions of God, over the man-made material sacred images honoring God and the saints. Within the traditional culture of Scrafito the scratching in churches, sacred art on the walls within the traditional culture of Scrafito the scratching in churches, sacred art on the walls and altars constituted an interactive discursive space. Beginning in the later 15th century however the altar area became more regulated and the physical integrity of sacred art on the altar was increasingly the product primarily of the negotiations between the artist and the custodial institution. I am mercifully moving toward my conclusion. Juliet Fleming in her study of early modern English literary graffiti notes a marked distinction between the culture of graffiti on the one hand and contemporary manuscript and print culture on the other. She characterizes graffiti as collective, aphoristic and inscriptive in contrast with manuscript and print culture which she characterizes as individualistic, lyric and voice centered. Can an analogous distinction be made in the context of Italian visual culture? Here the contrasting terms would be on the one hand the culture of scratching Scrafito that I've outlined in this lecture where viewers and users responded to figile imagery and motifs on panel paintings by marking and transforming them. The other contrasting term or cultural domain would be that of the professional artist the commissioning patron and the authorized initial context of reception. The situation is complicated by the fact that these two cultural domains were not distinct since the one Scrafito was quite literally physically superimposed upon the other, the commissioned painting in situ. Scratching like Fleming's literary graffiti was collective in the way that it disrupted a professional artist working contractually for specific patrons and custodial institutions and made the work of art accessible to wider publics and users who acted directly upon them and transformed their material and representational properties and their meanings. Scrafito was collective too in that it required no professional training, technical expertise, manual dexterity or deep appreciation of artistic principles. These principles themselves as representation were repetitive often imprecise and approximate. Scratching acts were practical, performative, assertive and interactive. They were empowering, apotropaic, vengeful and a means of earning spiritual credit. They could be aphoristic taking justice into your own hands put the devil back in hell. They could be humorous, open your lips baby Jesus. These transformations to the physical integrity of the work of art could be construed as we have seen in Vizari's lament over Andrea del Castaño's scratched and broken flagellation of Christ as a misunderstanding and violation of the work as artifice, as an indication and also as an indication of poor custodial care for the work of art. The account that Vizari subsequently gives of how Andrea del Castaño run his fingernail across the paintings of his fellow artists to call attention to their errors effectively reposition scratching acts back within the domain of the professional practitioner. In Vizari's texts scratching acts so graphically varied and culturally diverse are assigned values. They are calibrated instrumentalized and set within a hierarchy. From Vizari's perspective better a damaging thumbnail by the volatile Castaño guided by artistic principles technical knowledge and the judgment of the eye than misunderstandings about artistic efficacy by children and simple minded people. I hope that I have shown this evening that there were other equally viable values that could be given to the act of scratching. Thank you. Just incredibly interesting. I think we have time for a couple questions. Take questions. Thank you and we are going to I'm literally going to throw this at you and it is meant to be thrown and popped. This is our one thing that was not my idea. Ready? Stephen, you've got the question. This is a little black is there a microphone in there? I'll speak into it. There we go. This is an astonishing body of material you've assembled and your analysis is really compelling. The only part where I began to have some doubts was about the sort of diachronic framing you started gave it at one point three quarters of the way through about the changing format of the altarpiece that maybe altarpieces are less accessible and you showed a very particular example of a Venetian church San Pietro and Castello around 1500s. I think of a famous episode from about 10 years later where Titian paints an annunciation for this much despised much loathed bishop's agent in Treviso fabulously named Malchiostro and we're told and it's not just this confirmation and documentation at the time that he was hated and that he had the temerity to put his own portrait like behind the Virgin Mary in the annunciation and the people just disgusted. But there's no sign or not that I know of that image was ever touched. It's also a very accessible image in the cathedral of Treviso. It's not like up high up on a wall we pretty much see it in the same conditions today as it always was. So I mean one diachronic implication given that most of your best examples come from before 1450 and the Trecento or early Quarticento is it that the practice falls into abeyance? Well it's not, okay I'll answer, you may have rejoinder that's in the altarpiece context for the most part but it's certainly not in other domains of practice certainly not in domestic imagery not in portraits. So does the practice fall into abeyance? If possible, yeah. Okay and what would your thoughts be about that? Why? I'm just wondering then and this is going to sound very fanciful that the gold ground images that the polyptics, the material you present is material that is perceived to go out of fashion to be old fashioned by the late 15th century. Is it, is there any sense that instead of seeing these in terms of like the animate icon there's a sense of obsolescence of secularization of images that can now be consumed maltreated given the fact that the gold ground altarpieces and the major metropolitan centers are being moved from the altars into sacristies into convent rooms just as cassone paintings going out of fashion by 1500 are being moved into storerooms children's rooms etc. So would you suggest then that some of these acts then also take place in these later places that that would be kind of a more interesting reading than just to say people who are just got you know, they recognize art as art and there's something about the style of Botticelli and Gravelli and Mantegna that doesn't mandate this kind of performance That's really helpful I think though I would, I mean I sort of did pay a lot of attention moving through churches where there are some altarpieces that are still fairly intact in their form and it is more difficult to physically reach and there are some cases where certain kinds of images like face of Judas or diabolical images will continue through the 16th century and in some cases some kind of latter or stepping up or even standing on the altar would have been necessary so I think what I'm going to try to do is hold on to some notion that the monumentality and the changes in format make it more difficult but I very much appreciate what you're saying and I think that is really helpful. Thank you Throw it David and thank you so much for a really rich and engaging talk that did exactly I think what everyone had hoped for is offering material about renaissance painting that is useful to think with across all disciplines so thank you very much for that and my question I suppose is that following on Steven's certain extent is maybe a bit banal but what about going back to the notion of graffiti as something that is purposely done but kind of miscreant I loved the section of your talk about swearing and about the ways in which it's done not as blasphemy but just as part of a masculine culture of sort of performativity of disrespect and I just think that it might be an interesting category to add into the more devotional and very self-reflexive interventions that you're proposing I think that's where I'd like to go so yes very much and I probably should take some of the word devotional out but yes I would very much like to go in that direction so thank you for accentuating that and offering that We're going to keep this over here Thank you for this wonderful talk Your talk actually reminded me of this great English teacher I once had who would write on the chalk board and then to kind of underline points would kind of tap at the sort of things he would draw like with great insistence until the chalk kind of dissolved and it made me think I mean that's kind of a funny example but it made me English teacher actually made me think of a kind of was there perhaps a in some cases a didactic purpose to some of these particularly the repetitive scratches but you know don't you know don't pray to declare pray to Christ I mean do we have any evidence about preaching practices I think that's wonderful thank you I'm just going to say thank you wonderfully I like that and I will keep in my mind the image of your English teacher and the chalk I had one who threw chalk at me let me just write something down anyway I was particularly taken with your analysis of San Sebastiano and his arrows and was thinking the whole time after about the culture of popular magic sympathetic magic in the period to what extent do you think it might be as you know it's a very deep culture it's a very ancient culture the idea being if you make a figure of something and then you do something to the figure you've done it to also to the person or thing to which that figure eludes and I think I've only scratched the surface of that idea in my own research but there's a lot about that I'm curious if somebody said to you that many of the examples and the different very carefully nuanced terms that you've explored could be subordinated under the general notion of kind of magical thinking or popular sympathetic magic what would be your response to subject comment well first I'm going to ask you after I respond to go back to why those are necessarily not compatible because absolutely and then I've actually worked up a section on the demonic and I that is very much what I explore and I explore it in relationship to formulations in the period to ways in which people attempt to manage demons and very much believe that there was a concern about demonic inspirating in images themselves and that act of in some way I call it sort of managing sort of makes the figuration less available for demonic presence and manipulation and use the concept of sympathetic magic so absolutely but I guess I don't I mean I guess I'm trying and in working on like a book rather than an article I'm trying to in some ways keep some of the domain separate demons are on altarpieces they're in churches so these two overlap but why do you see that kind of thinking incompatible with some of the ways that I was working within this presentation oh I don't at all I was just suggesting that you might well subordinate many of the different types of acts that seem to be involved here with that and again you pointed yourself to in the one case very very forcefully and very convincingly I just think it's a lot of it squares a lot with stuff that I happen to know and mainly actually what really dovetails from my crazy great grandmother who used to take family pictures of people she didn't like and would scratch into the faces X's parallel lines parts of the body etc and say maledictions over them which you know it's kind of interesting you can frame it as this kind of culture of masculine sort of disrespect on the one hand but actually a lot of this stuff was probably also practiced by women and I'm very interested also in the very fact that you know cursing comes from well cursing it's actually a curse which is part of the magical culture so I just was hoping to hear you say that you were in fact exploring that because I think that would be a fascinating thing to develop and gender is also relevant here particularly to get into the second half of the 15th century because women were considered to be in one way or another managers of diabolism but agents of kind of the devil but they definitely are involved in these kinds of practices and when you find texts there are references both to sorcerers and sorceresses and I do an exercise I teach a class on the diabolical it was the miraculous and diabolical and I make students sort of take an image I don't tell them ahead of time what's going to happen and they have to bring an image of someone who they have very negative feelings about and then someone who they particularly care for and go around the room they describe how much they really love this person they don't bring something precious on in but then they have to take the person they care about and stamp on it and tear it up and they have extraordinarily actually my husband who is a psychotherapist thought this was a I could be doing serious damage to that so I thought I should suspend that particular exercise sounds like fun actually oh dear thank you that was a fantastic talk and I really appreciated your continual insistence of relating the scratching to the body itself there's a lot of work of course being done on the body right now and it's of particular interest to me but I actually wanted to ask a question about a specific image I wonder if you could go back to the image where they were scratching the feet of the I'm going to go out and please don't be horrified about how many images there are come on oh I have to use a mouse not my finger okay I can't find the mouse it might take a while to get back I'm not finding a mouse but I'll just I can go back okay we can keep talking why don't you describe the specific reason that I was interested in that image was because there were not only parallel lines above the feet of the persecutors but also there were lines in other areas and I was just interested in the logistic issue of how much pressure it would take to make certain kinds of cuts so there's scratches on the shin of the man with the red tunic and I thought I saw another scratch elsewhere I was just wondering how do you differentiate those other scratches because it looks like there's actually a cross on his shin from some of the other and then there's on the man at the bottom with the green tunic there's also a scratch there as well so how do you differentiate between marks that you're seeing is a two part answer for that one of them is I've been in talking to a material scientist who works on who has done some work on cuts and how to imagine implements I've been encouraged and I'll have to do this at some point but figure out how to do the construct a part but create a panel painting in the technique and experiment with different kinds of implements and different kinds of how much it takes to do certain things when I first was working on this I actually went from Washington I went to the National Gallery and I asked if one of the scientists and conservators would meet with me and I showed them some of the early findings and then asked to tell them that Castagno the under the Castagno using his thumbnail and Barbara Berry the scientist took a panel off her shelf that was a mock-up of a image said to be by Castagno just coincidentally and she ran her thumb across it and then we all ran our thumbs across and you could actually very clearly make marks so that part of it I do need to do some experimentation the other I guess what I'm doing at this moment and I think I want to write up and like not work on this for the next 15 years the way I do the miraculous images I don't want to take over my life too much but I I sort of need to look at layering and sometimes what will happen is I'll go in for one type of scratch and not notice that there are multiple scratches or they'll be like that I was not sure was the best example when I had the Duccio Maestà the devil because Christ figure is somewhat compromised there but so some of it is just my thinking and reading and I guess what I would feel here is that these particular marks that are so emphatically kind of right at the foot level maybe at least these two I see as a consistent kind of practice and I wouldn't have problems thinking of an overlay of either a different kind of meaning or somebody else coming and scratching in different ways so what it kind of requires is my familiarity across so many different examples and some of them are not precise some of them are sort of a loose on gesturing so yes the answer is very possible I'm being very careful about what I decide are actual crosses and there are some really interesting demonic examples of crosses and in the demonic literature there is discussion about if you're trying to ward off evil taking across so that works nicely so yes I'm open and there's going to be in some ways a kind of interpretation that I have to impose based on familiarity across examples but I'm trying to be careful. If you would permit me to ask one more question in relation to that I wonder in terms of you talked about the thumbnail the finger marks are you noticing any damage from oils in the skin or any repetitive marks that would specifically be from a finger rather than a sharp end? I would love to but I guess one of the advantages of being able to look at the scratches is that they have a little bit of clarity these surfaces are so compromised you can only get so far by going and reading really responsible conservation files and let me tell you a lot of conservation curatorial files are not richly useful and informative so that would be difficult and I know that their cases it's I think the manuscript people have an advantage there where you really can see rubbing much more clearly but yes I would like to keep that open and I was talking to the conservator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Terri Linelli who's actually really interested in preserving sort of signs of historical use she's trying to leave an image has been coordinated at some point she tries to leave the fixture and we've got a lot of kind of marks visible and we've had really interesting conversations that might do something collaborative with a really beautifully scratched and quite visible example but she, where was I going with this? I lost my thread. Finger marks? She simply described there is an example of a painting in the galleries where she was called in an emergency situation dressed with you know chapstick right on the mouth of a sacred figure and so she kind of wanted to leave it up but was not able to but yeah so I guess the short answer is I would love that and I'm not sure you know it would just have to be suggestive and I haven't had an image yet where I've just said ah that really is a great example but I would certainly be open to that of course. Thank you. I think you have to get the cube and then go. No. I wonder what that means. Maybe you better do something protective. Thank you so much. I had a question about seductive bodies like the body of Eve in the Cleveland Pradella. What struck me there is that the marking that was maybe denying her power or trying to control it still allowed the viewer to really enjoy her body and I was wondering what thoughts you had on that further thoughts you had on that. Yeah and I mean I believe that there's a kind of even though there's a sort of implement between the hand and the surface that this is a touching it's a there's something you know sensual about touching and in fact in reading that wonderful Pradella by Giovanni di Paolo that has so many devils and sinners there are some marks that follow the contours of the bodies as if there's a sensual kind of acknowledgement in the process so yes I would say there's a kind of charged relationship and the Eve the figure of Eve in that painting in Cleveland the tip of her breast has been sort of in some way touched or manipulated and then also her her features as well so yes and that's a section I haven't really worked on that much yet and want to work. I want to work on an incredibly difficult category and I don't know if it will yield there. Those are the Cassoni which are the furniture chess which are among the most compromised they're extremely scratched and kind of this is like Megan in using the anecdotal form to answer questions but Keith Christiansen curator at the Metropolitan Museum when I sort of showed you know talked to him about this project and we went to the gallery together said huh all you need to do to understand what's going on here is go to a public library go to the children section pull out a book and you'll find torn pages and scribbles board children sitting low to the ground that's what they're doing and so they're you know very well may have been and you know Stephen suggestion you know is that yes we may have had some board children but what I'm trying to do is read them very carefully and you get some of the same patterns that I'm finding elsewhere and ways that interact with the imagery and there's some fantastic ways that classical antique sculptures are actually very carefully marked on Cassoni so I'd like to work with the bodies and there's great Griselda Boccaccio's story of Griselda that's one where I have multiple examples and she gets she gets it yeah okay