Benutzerspezifische Werkzeuge

Color and Relief: The Boundaries between Painting and Sculpture in Eleventh-Century Müstair

As an artistic medium, medieval stucco relief defies easy classification. On the one hand, as a three-dimensional relief, stucco is a distinctive subclass of sculpture. On the other, as a polychromed, plaster-based material that adheres to walls, stucco is materially and functionally related to fresco painting. Stucco is an interstitial medium; it falls somewhere between conventional categories of painting and sculpture.

This workshop will examine the polychromed stucco reliefs depicting saints, the Evangelist symbols, and angels in the late eleventh-century St. Ulrich’s Chapel in Müstair. Drawing on both textual sources and images, the workshop will ask broadly if a notion of medium specificity existed in the eleventh century and where – if anywhere – interstitial media, like stucco relief, fit into the equation. It will then explore the particular case of Müstair and how medieval perceptions of polychromed relief may have guided the medium’s use at the site.