Pre/Early Modern Forum: Joseph Salvatore Ackley (Wesleyan)

“Defining Gold in the Medieval West”

It is a challenge to overstate the centrality of gold to medieval Europe. Be it images of gold conjured across literary traditions, the idea of gold debated by philosophers and alchemists, or the actual, physical stuff struck into coins and manipulated by goldsmiths, gold rested at the heart of a variety of intellectual, economic, and artistic practices. Within medieval art, the ubiquity of gold—in jewelry, reliquaries, and plate; as powdered ink scintillating from manuscripts; as leaf applied to parchment, panel painting, and sculpture—can render it overly familiar and risk flattening its medieval complexities. This lecture, focusing on precious metalwork, seeks instead to defamiliarize medieval gold and examine its primary definitions within the Latin West. Sources include artistic treatises (e.g., Theophilus on the four types of gold), natural philosophy (e.g., Albert the Great, Hildegard of Bingen, the encyclopedic tradition), alchemy (especially Pseudo-Geber), and Biblical exegesis and literature. By the late Middle Ages gold emerges as something pulsing, reddish, fiery, and hot, influenced by the sun and medicinally salubrious; alchemists will position it as the perfect material ideal. We will also query recent notions of medieval “materiality,” including how literalist approaches may complement the interpretive and allegorical methods more commonly exercised within our discipline.

Joseph Salvatore Ackley is Associate Professor of Art History at Wesleyan University. His research focuses on metalwork, gold, and radiant media, including panel painting, book painting, and polychrome wood sculpture, in the medieval West. His first book project, Medieval Gold: Radiance and Weight, examines medieval definitions of gold and its spectacular working in precious metalwork. He has published on church treasury inventories, precious-metal figurative sculpture, medieval definitions of ars and craft, and the historiography of the decorative arts. With Shannon L. Wearing he co-edited Illuminating Metalwork: Metal, Object, and Image in Medieval Manuscripts (De Gruyter, 2022), a volume exploring the use of metallic media in manuscript painting and the depiction therein of precious metalwork.