Date:
Thursday, January 26, 2023 (All day) to Thursday, April 6, 2023 (All day)
Location:
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery, Prior Performing Arts Center, the College of the Holy Cross, 1 College St., Worcester, MA
An exhibition exploring the impact of art objects manufactured in the eastern Mediterranean on the visual culture of medieval England and western Europe, organized around an iconic set of mold-made tiles discovered at Chertsey Abbey outside of London, but probably commissioned for London’s Westminster Palace around 1250. These include a famous pair of roundels showing the English king Richard the Lionheart and the Ayyubid sultan Saladin (Salah al-Din) in combat. Excavated from the ruined site of Chertsey Abbey in the 19th century, the original composition of the fragmented tiles has been reconstructed, including their lost Latin texts. The reconstruction has demonstrated not only that the entire mosaic addressed the theme of the crusades, but also that its design evoked that of imported eastern Mediterranean silks. Carried home by crusaders, eastern silks as well as ceramics, metalwork and other items were highly valued by European audiences, who incorporated them into sacred objects, displayed them in places of esteem, and imitated their designs – as was the case with the Chertsey tiles. The composition of the Chertsey floor relies on visual traditions of textiles developed by Muslim and Orthodox Christian artists in the eastern Mediterranean, even while the iconography attends to the theme of English victory over foreign opponents. By pairing the Chertsey tiles with contemporaneous European and eastern Mediterranean objects, this exhibition endeavors to illuminate the specific and complex contexts that informed the tiles’ production and design. Curated by Amanda Luyster (College of the Holy Cross), with the support of Deborah Coleman Diggins and Timothy W. Diggins, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the International Center of Medieval Art, the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.