This will be a double session of papers given by two recently-completed Courtauld Institute PhDs.
Dr Matilde Grimaldi – Making visible the invisible: understanding the lost Romanesque cathedral of Tortosa
The Christian capture of the Spanish town of Tortosa in 1148 marked a crucial moment in the establishment of Catalunya Nova after nearly four centuries of Muslim occupation, and the construction of a new Romanesque cathedral became an important symbol of the conquest. Despite its importance, however, almost nothing survives of this building and its existence can only be traced through a couple of sixteenth-century sketches, a few documents, some scant archaeological evidence and a few sculptural remains. In this paper I will propose a reconstruction of the cathedral, drawing on new archaeological and documentary evidence.
Dr Emma Edwards – Bacini: Imported Ceramics as Architectural Decoration in the 11th and 12th Century
During the 11th Century the use of ceramics as a form of exterior architectural decoration began to appear on the Italian peninsula. This decoration mainly took the form of glazed basins, known as bacini, imported for the domestic market but which found their way into the building fabric of ecclesiastical foundations. Much of the discussion of the early use of baicni on the Italian peninsula has focused on Pisa, where many examples of this type of decoration survive. This paper presents a section of my PhD research which sought to understand the interesting re-use of these imported ceramic objects from a broader perspective, rather than a specifically Pisan point of view.
Matilde Grimaldi recently received her PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art. Her dissertation (The lost cathedral of Tortosa and its context: 1148-1703) dealt with the development of Romanesque art in Southern Catalonia and the relationship this process had with the wider Mediterranean artistic milieu and the historic forces shaping the region. She published in English, Spanish and Italian on various topics across medieval Catalonia and Southern Italy.
She has worked in the Gothic Ivories Project as Project Officer and is currently Editor and Publicity Officer for the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland. Matilde also works as a freelance archaeological illustrator: see her website for more details.
Emma Edwards recently completed her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Entitled Reception and Reorientation: The Impact of Internationally Traded Objects in Italian Art and Architecture (950-1150), the thesis explored the artistic relationships between imported objects from the Byzantine and Islamic Mediterranean and artistic practice in mercantile centres of the Italian peninsula in the early Medieval period. Emma is an Assistant Curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.