Students in Professor Ittai Weinryb’s Material and Materiality course are tackling questions of tangibility, ritual, process, technique, and reception in Medieval culture. Recently, they visited The Met Cloisters to view the exhibition of miniscule carved wooden prayer beads, Small Wonders: Gothic Boxwood Miniatures, where they admired the display of unique “prayer nuts,” handheld spheres carved from boxwood with intricate biblical scenes. Object Conservator Pete Dandridge introduced the elegant display and led a discussion about related objects in the permanent collection. As described in the exhibition catalog, microscopes, CT scans, and extensive study from curators and conservators at the Met and the Art Gallery of Ontario reveal much about how the wonderful objects were made

Small Wonders provides a case study for how boxwood can be used for intricate carving. Native to most of Europe and with a dense grain and ability to resist splitting or chipping, boxwood can defy its own materiality in sculptural carving and instead resemble ivory, a bronze casting, or even a 3D printed object. The course entails diverse activities such as examining the sensory qualities of marble, exploring the difference between azurite and lapis lazuli blue pigments, debating the more recent history of the web-based cloud, and the delightful trip to the Cloisters.

~ Brockett Horne, first year MA student