David Ganz spoke at the Seminar in Comparative Medieval Material Culture on Wednesday, December 9, 2015. His talk was entitled “‘And his raiment began shining, exceeding white as snow’: Investments in the Transfiguration.”
At Bard Graduate Center, Ganz explored the metaphor of (in)vestment as a key for the materiality of medieval treasure objects. The point of departure is the role of garments in the transfiguration of Christ, the most prominent theophany in the gospels. Especially in Mark’s account, the gaze of the witnesses of this event is attracted by a metamorphosis of Christ’s clothes which begin “shining, exceeding white as snow, so as no fuller can white them.” A case study showed how the representation of this story became a place for staging and rethinking issues of materiality in different artistic media.
David Ganz is
Professor of Medieval Art at the University of Zürich. After studying Art
History, Philosophy, and Archeology, he was a Doctoral Fellow in Art History at
the Bibliotheca Hertziana. He earned his PhD from the University of Hamburg in
2000, and from 2000 to 2005 he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Young
Researcher Group “Cultural history and theology of the Image in Christianity,”
headed by Thomas Lentes at the University of Muenster. In 2006 he did his
Habilitation at the University of Konstanz, and from 2006 to 2007 he taught as
a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Bochum and Jena. In 2007 he was
awarded a Heisenberg Fellowship by the German Research Foundation, and from
2010 to 2013 he taught as a Visiting Professor at the University of Basel and
at the University of Heidelberg. His research focuses on pictorial narrative,
on the representation of visions, on pictures in the plural, and on clothing as
metaphor. His publications include Buch-Gewänder: Prachteinbände
im Mittelalter (Berlin: Reimer
2013), Medien der Offenbarung: Visiondarstellungen im
Mittelalter (Berlin: Reimer 2008),
and Barocke Bilderbauten: Erzählung, Institution und
Illusion (Petersberg: Imhof 2003).
