From ruins to reconstruction: past and present

Keynote speech introducing the Session ‘Ancient Cities: Past and Current Perspectives

Scottish Archaeological Research Framework: Future Thinking on Carved Stones

No abstract available

Circulating agency: The V&A, Scotland and the multiplication of plaster casts of 'Celtic crosses'

The creation of bespoke collections of plaster casts of ‘Celtic' sculpture for the 1901 Glasgow International Exhibition and museums in Dundee in 1904/11 and Aberdeen in 1905 provides a Scottish lens on a wider phenomenon and its context: South Kensington's role in the provinces, museums and ‘imperial localism', burgeoning curatorial professionalism and networking, milestones in early medieval scholarship, objects as ‘archaeology' or ‘art', the value of replicas, and the Celtic Revival. A ‘provinces-up' approach explores practices on the ground to reveal the significance of the work of the V&A's Circulation Department and of people such as R. F. Martin, that institutional histories omit. Exposing how the Dundee and Aberdeen art exhibitions were selectively derivative of Glasgow's antiquarian enterprise, and the vagaries of their subsequent survival, illuminates the importance of understanding what past and present collections omit and why, as well as what they include

The Aura of the Irish Book: The Cuala and Dolmen Presses

Irish printing in the early years of the Celtic Revival had fallen into disarray, and as a response to this circumstance, Elizabeth Yeats and her brother W.B. Yeats inaugurated a new era of Irish printing with the creation of the Cuala Press. This study seeks to situate the production of this distinctively Irish nationalist press in relation to the reified social relations encoded in the materiality of books produced in England. The distinction between the Irish private press movement and the commercially produced books of England emphasizes the forms colonial resistance embedded in the materiality of the Cuala books. Furthermore, the Dolmen Press, an Irish private press founded five years after the closing of the Cuala in 1946, continues the tradition of Irish press production through its material and linguistic dialogue with colonial representation and the formation of an Irish identity in an international context

Expiscation! Disentangling the later biography of the St Andrews Sarcophagus

Replicas may complicate but also help to complete the biographies of their parent objects. Disentangling the antiquarian history of the St Andrews Sarcophagus introduces an unexpectedly precocious and productive programme of early 19th-century replication of archaeological objects for the purposes of archaeological science (‘expiscation’), and its subsequent commodification. Credit for this goes to the pioneering actions of George Buist, a newspaper editor and intellectual then based in Fife (eastern Scotland). New archival and documentary research, physical examination of surviving plaster casts and scientific analysis of the original Sarcophagus provide a tantalising glimpse into the interest and energies of early antiquarian societies and their web of connections across Britain and Ireland. They also highlight how the poor or non-existent documentation of past conservation and display practices can hamper our ability to understand the composite biography of the casts and the subject begin cast. This study also demonstrates how the fabric of plaster casts can tell us more about their stories too, not least about their technology and the decisive role of the under-appreciated craftspeople who made them

Fragmented Ornament: An Analysis of Print Reproductions of Medieval Ornament and Decoration during the Gothic Revival

This thesis considers how printed reproductions of medieval ornament, produced in England during the Nineteenth Century, had the potential to misrepresent medieval art to the public, since they only focused on one element of ornamental significance from an object, thereby presenting an incomplete picture

Visual Contagions, the Art Historian, and the Digital Strategies to Work on Them

How do images and styles spread out over time and place? This article presents how art historians can use digital methods to study “visual contagions”– the visual part of globalization: how images circulate, as material artefacts (paintings, sculptures, engravings, etc.…) or in reproductions (in illustrated periodicals, in photography, or on the internet…), through which channels (cultural, geographical, political…) and according to which visual logics. It sketches the new possibilities offered by deep learning and artificial intelligence algorithms applied to images, to better understand the epidemiology of visual diffusions. This Paper is also an opportunity to assess 10 years of digital approach to artistic globalization with the Artl@s Project (https://www.artlas.huma-num.fr)