"The Unemancipated Figure"
Tuesday, November 11, 2025 4:45 PM
Goldwin Smith Hall G22
Abstract
During the High Middle Ages, monumental sculpture returned to the world of Northern Europe in what Otto Pächt called “one of the most astonishing phenomena” in the history of medieval art. Scholars have described this shift with a surprisingly consistent repertoire of terms: the emancipation, liberation, or affranchissement of the figure. These widely circulating tropes reveal how the discipline uncritically internalized the equation of form with freedom and agency with embodiment at one of its most crucial historical junctures. Revisiting a set of key monuments, especially a life-size anthropomorphic candelabrum crafted at Erfurt in the mid-twelfth century, this talk argues that bondage, constraint, and domination were instead the main preoccupations of artists experimenting with sculpture in the round. Long unrecognized, the unemancipated figure at the center of medieval art history demands a new accounting of how art will or won’t make us free.
Biography
Luke Fidler is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on the art, material culture, and political economy of the western Middle Ages. He is currently a fellow at Cornell's Society for the Humanities, working on a book about medieval sculpture's ambivalent relationship to forms of coercion. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago.
