Destroyed-Disappeared-Lost-Never Were

Beate Fricke is Professor of History of Art at the University of Bern. She is the author of Fallen Idols, Risen Saints: Saint Foy of Conques and the Revival of Monumental Sculpture in Medieval Art and coeditor of The Public in the Picture: Involving the Beholder in Antique, Islamic, Byzantine, and Western Medieval and Renaissance Art. Aden Kumler is Professor of Art History at the University of Basel. She is the author of Translating Truth: Ambitious Images and Religious Knowledge in Late Medieval France and England.

"Destroyed-Disappeared-Lost-Never Were makes a fresh contribution to the field, one that dexterously balances historical perspectives and theoretical awareness. Its short essays cover a variety of topics with a global reach but with a common concern: how the 'existential uncertainty' resulting from works that are no longer extant or may never have existed outside verbal evocations has shaped and continues to shape the practice of art history." -Brigitte Buettner, author of Boccaccio's "Des cleres et nobles femmes": Systems of Signification in an Illuminated Manuscript "Both as a whole and as individual essays, the contents of Destroyed - Disappeared - Lost - Never Were contribute significantly to various urgent scholarly conversations in art history today. Highly original and written by experts in their respective fields, each of the book's chapters focus on serious lacunae in the medieval discipline, unpacking them in creative ways in relation to both primary and secondary materials. Between them, these exciting essays offer novel readings of previously untreated objects, important revisions to existing historical and theoretical narratives, and original critiques of received historiographies." -Jack Hartnell, author of Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages