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Save the Date for “Thinking with Medieval Images,” November 21, 2026

Detail of a manuscript page with a blue and red Latin inscription framing a roundel set into a square with red and white patterned corners. The roundel contains a large, haloed female figure labeled PHYLOSOPHYA, who is seated with her hands resting on smaller half-circles containing women labeled PHYSICA and LOGICA; at her feet is a third half-circle containing a woman labeled ETHICA.
Personifications of Philosophy, Physics, Logic, and Ethics. Bible of Saint-Thierry (Reims, Bib. Carnegie, MS 22–23), II, fol. 25r, detail.

Please plan to join the Index either in person or via livestream for the November 21 conference “Thinking with Medieval Images.”

The proliferation of medieval images via digital collections, online publications, and social media platforms places them at the center of scholarly and public discourse about medieval culture—as well as in the crosshairs of those seeking control over modern interpretations of the past. In this they are indeed worth a thousand words. As representations of people, things, and ideas from deep history, they claim a truth value that is easily challenged; they reflect historical actions, ideas, and attitudes but could shift radically in meaning; and they speak in multiple medieval voices yet remain susceptible to modern manipulation, especially as generative AI tools muddy their relevance to truthful historical exchange.

The situation raises an age-old question: what can medieval images do for those who research the Middle Ages? How and why do we think with them? Answering this requires action on many fronts. We must look critically at how scholars deploy images to support historical arguments. We must reevaluate the promise and limitations of visual evidence, recognizing how their significance could transform along with the context and expectations of their makers and viewers. We must call out their scholarly and popular misuse while reflecting on our own responsibility and impact when we use them.

“Thinking with Medieval Images” invites eight scholars from multiple disciplines, from art history and musicology to history and comparative literature, to launch this conversation. What can we expect to learn from medieval images? What historiographic and methodological guardrails have guided our inquiry, and how well have they served us? How do we address the multivalency and shifting reception of images, both in the Middle Ages and in the present? When is our faith in images misplaced, and how far can modern discourse take them?

Find the speaker roster and current information by following the conference website.

Thank You for Your Patience

BERJAYA
Personification of Patience, mosaic, Venice, San Marco.

If you’re a regular Index user, you might have noticed slowdowns in the database recently. This stems from extremely high bot traffic that is difficult for our complex system to handle. We appreciate your patience as we work with our technology manager to mitigate the problem.

Bad Bunny’s Medieval Inspiration

This satirical post was first published on April Fool’s Day, 2026.

If you loved the Super Bowl LX halftime performance by Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, a.k.a. Bad Bunny, you’re already a fan. And if you knew that in addition to being an award-winning rapper, singer, and record producer, the King of Latin Trap also dabbles in pro wrestling and won a WWE 24/7 Championship in 2021, then you surely are a superfan. But did you know that Bad Bunny’s name was likely inspired by a childhood love of medieval art?

In public interviews, the artist explains his choice of name as a reference to a childhood photo that captured a young Benito wearing a rabbit costume and looking grumpy. But according to his favorite aunt, there’s another, cuter reason. In a recent conversation, Tía Fabiola reports that Benito was an avid childhood reader and especially loved books about the Middle Ages. His favorite one was a pop-up book full of pictures inspired by medieval manuscript miniatures.

Those pictures sparked an interest that continued when he was student in audiovisual communications at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo. It was likely at the Biblioteca UPRA that he discovered the miniatures that would inspire his musical persona.

Detail of a manuscript page with a picture of a rabbit using a slide to place loaves of bread into an oven.
Bunny Baking. Pontifical, London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 451, fol. 6r.

Rabbits are everywhere in medieval art, especially in the margins of Gothic manuscripts, where they participate in just about every aspect of medieval life, from baking to music-making. However, as Eleanor Jackson of the British Library explains in a 2021 blog post, many of these “fluffy ruffians” are not merely frolicking. Many are wreaking subversive havoc, turning normal power relationships upside down in scenes where aggressors become cowards, prey turn on their predators, and the weak defeat the strong.

BERJAYA
Bunny Shooting a Hunter. Smithfield Decretals, London, British Library, Royal MS 10 E IV, fol. 61v.

The intrepid rodents harass hunters, fence with hounds, and attack fully armored knights—the last probably the inspiration for the famous Monty Python killer rabbit. In short, these bunnies were baaaaad.

BERJAYA
Bunny Threatening a Knight. Gorleston Psalter, London, British Library, Add. MS 49622, fol. 149v.

It doesn’t take much to understand the appeal of these lively Leporidae for a young Benito, a performer whose boundary-bending performances would also become famous for speaking truth to power. Their influence might even be discerned in certain details of his recent Super Bowl show. While the unique sights, sounds, and traditions of Puerto Rican culture were the most important inspiration for this iconography, one can’t help but wonder if Bad Bunny’s boyhood love of medieval rabbits gave some of them a little extra meaning. But don’t take our word for it; judge for yourself!

A manuscript page with Latin writing and a painting of a rabbit holding a green sheaf and a red cord around the neck of a man who is falling to his knees.
Bunny Capturing a Man. Breviary, Washington, DC, Library of Congress, MS 85, fol. 217r.

Workers cutting sugar cane. This opening sequence of the Super Bowl show made obvious reference to the centrality of the sugar industry to the historical colonization and exploitation of Puerto Rico by global powers. Might our artist also have had in mind this medieval bas-de-page miniature in which a rabbit captures his overseer in the middle of a harvest?

BERJAYA
Bunnies Defending a Tower. Bréviaire de Renaud de Bar, Verdun, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 107, fol. 137v.

El Morro and its garitas. This sixteenth-century castle with its distinctive sentry boxes has been a symbol of Puerto Rican culture for many. Could Bad Bunny’s inclusion of these round towers in the Super Bowl wedding scene have resonated with his memories of medieval manuscripts like this one, in which feisty rabbit armies hold their ground against would-be canid colonizers?

BERJAYA
Bunny with Toad, Bull, and Flowers. Book of hours, New York, Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.250, fol. 4v.

Concho the Crested Toad. “Concho,” an animated version of the sapo concho, a critically endangered crested toad that’s native to Puerto Rico and has been a part of Bad Bunny’s larger brand, appeared on the big screen during the Superbowl show and is featured in his NFL-related merch. Could the musician’s affection for this beloved native reptile have been fostered by manuscript images like this one, where a toad joins a bunny and a bull in an idyllic floral setting at the bottom of a sixteenth-century book of hours?

Only Bad Bunny himself can say whether his persona was inspired by childhood memories of those revolutionary rabbits in the margins of medieval manuscripts. But on this April 1, the possibility has our imaginations hopping.

Fifth Volume in the Signa Series Now Published

A rust-colored book cover with a square photo of a tapestry with two human figures, one partial, and the title "Fragments: Medieval Makers, Modern Responses, edited by Catherine A. Fernandex and Pamela A. Patton

The Index of Medieval Art is happy to announce the publication in both print and e-book of Fragments: Medieval Makers, Modern Responses as the fifth volume of the series “Signa: Papers of the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University,” co-published with Penn State University Press. Edited by Catherine A. Fernandez and Pamela A. Patton based on a scholarly conference of the same name, the volume brings together seven distinguished authors—Patricia Blessing, William Diebold, Shirin Fozi, Silvia Gianolio, Gregor Kalas, Henry David Schilb, and Susanne Wittekind—to consider the risks and rewards of working with fragments in the study of medieval culture. Their insights into how fragments are perceived and repurposed across time is certain to encourage critical reflection on the fragment as both obstacle and opportunity in reconstructing medieval worlds.

The co-published Signa series was launched in 2018 as a partnership between the Index of Medieval Art and Penn State University Press to produce high quality, peer-reviewed publications of Index-sponsored scholarship. The series includes the following titles, all available via the Penn State University Press website and in many university libraries:

BERJAYA

Art, Power, and Resistance in the Middle Ages
Edited by Pamela A. Patton
2025

BERJAYA

Out of Bounds: Exploring the Limits of Medieval Art
Edited by Pamela A. Patton and Maria Alessia Rossi
2023

BERJAYA

Iconography Beyond the Crossroads
Image, Meaning, and Method in Medieval Art

Edited by Pamela A. Patton and Catherine A. Fernandez
2022

BERJAYA

The Lives and Afterlives of Medieval Iconography
Edited by Pamela A. Patton and Henry Schilb
2021

Hopeful New Year

BERJAYA
Personification of Month, January, Stammheim Missal, J. Paul Getty Museum, MS 64/97.MG.21, fol. 3v.

As 2025 draws to a close and we look toward a new year, we wish all our friends and researchers a season of restoration, peace, and hope. We look forward to seeing you in our new space on the third floor of the Princeton University Art Museum in late January 2026.

Index Guest Book Series: Elizabeth Sears

The Index of Medieval Art is pleased to continue a series of blog posts that delve into the history of the organization through interviews with senior scholars in the field of art history. The “Guest Book Series” takes its name from the Index guest books, which have been signed by hundreds of art historians who have consulted the Index files over the past century. We’ve enjoyed reading their recollections and warmly thank Elizabeth Sears, George H. Forsyth, Jr. Professor emerita of the History of Art at the University of Michigan, Acting Director of the Index (1987-88), and longtime friend of the Index for her time and responses.

Please tell us a little about yourself and your work. Where did you study? What inspired you to become a medievalist? 

I became an iconographer/iconologist, trained in Hamburg-based, “Warburgian” method, well before it occurred to me even to consider becoming a medievalist. This happened at Duke University, where William Heckscher, one of Panofsky’s last students in Hamburg, had recently arrived as Professor and Director of the Duke Art Museum. He had left Hamburg in 1936 as part of the great exodus of “non-Aryan” scholars from Nazi Germany, and his postwar career had taken him to Iowa, to Utrecht, and as a last stop, to Duke. I volunteered as an intern my first year as an undergraduate, 1970, and I wrote what was probably my first art history paper for him, as an extracurricular exercise, on a crucifixion scene decorating the Renaissance bronze plaque by Moderno in the museum. The essay was trivial but important for me as I, in time, received from him the only (spectacularly excessive!) line-by-line critical reading of a text that I would receive as a student at Duke or later at Yale—and this experience, I think, informed my writing, teaching, and editorial work ever after.

A rectangular bronze plaquette depicting a man on a cross flanked by two other men on crosses. Surrounded below by figures holding weapons and shields, and women swooning in the foreground left.
Crucifixion of Christ, bronze plaquette, by Galeazzo Mondella (called Moderno). Italian, late 15th-early 16th century. Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 1969.6.1. Photo: © 2025 Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

I took classes with guest professors at Duke whom Heckscher had taught in the past and who would inculcate me in method. For Dario Covi (trained at Iowa), in a course on Northern Renaissance Art, I wrote on Dürer’s encounters with non-European artifacts, for Karla Langedijk (trained at Utrecht), in a two-semester seminar on “Iconological Problems” (which I later recognized as being pure Warburg), I wrote papers on the function and decoration of early Florentine Deschi da parto and on color symbolism in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (Duke possessed an early printed edition of the work): I remember earnestly creating a handwritten index of every mention of a color in Ripa’s descriptions of personifications (Abondanza to Zelo) as a start. It was at this point I began to feel  that I had discovered my path, that art history could be combined with the other subjects I had studied (history, literature, religion, anthropology, philosophy, psychology). The medieval component had entered in when I did a junior year abroad in Athens, there studying and visiting Byzantine as well as ancient monuments. A trip to Italy over Christmas break, with visits to the catacombs and early Christian churches of Rome, as well as the monuments of Ravenna, impressed me greatly. Yet, at the same time, I was doing summer internships at the Guggenheim Museum and might well have opted for early twentieth-century art had Heckscher not said: “Yes, you could study modern art, but would it be enough?” At Yale, I split my coursework between ancient and medieval art, working especially with J. J. Pollitt, John Clarke, and Walter Cahn—the last a student of Harry Bober, who was a student of Panofsky. Cahn had spent time at the Warburg Institute during the Gombrich era and was well-versed in its methods. My seminar papers as a graduate student, as I look back, seem always to have been somehow iconographical, treating the forms of content in their cultural contexts.

A pair of enameled and gold plaques depicting the busts of two nimbed and winged figures. Arch of Latin inscription above both figures.
Beatitudes plaques (Beati mites, Beati mundo corde). Mosan, c. 1160–70. London, Victoria and Albert Museum, 6817-1860. Photo: ©Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

When was your first visit to the Index in Princeton? Where was the Index located? With whom did you work there? Do you remember anything especially interesting about your visit? 

Graduate students at Yale, as those in other programs in the mid-1970s, would routinely make their way to the Index as part of their study of “style and iconography.” It was easy for me, as my family lived an hour’s drive away in northern New Jersey. I certainly visited in 1974-75 when working both on a Venetian panel in the Yale Art Gallery depicting Mary Magdalene for a class by Charles Seymour (his last I believe) and on the Beatitudes in a life-changing seminar by Walter Cahn treating twelfth-century Mosan Art. I would visit the Index again in 1978 for “Ages of Life,” the theme of my doctoral dissertation—a multifaceted topic which Walter Cahn and I landed upon, in part, as a means to get me to the Warburg Institute. At that point I spent four years in London, and I still return to the Institute just about every year. My first teaching appointment was at Princeton (1982-89), and it was then that I properly came to know the Index and its learned staff.

A detail of a lined notebook containing multiple signatures in various hands. Each line includes a date, a name, a location, and a research topic. One line is highlighted.
Elizabeth Sears first signed the Index guest book on April 11, 1975, while a graduate student at Yale University, indicating her dual subjects of interest, ‘Magdalen – Beatitude.” Photo: Index of Medieval Art Archives.
A detail of a lined notebook containing multiple signatures in various hands. Each line includes a date, a name, a location, and a research topic. One line is highlighted.
Sears signed the Index guest book about a year and a half later, on October 5, 1976, on a visit to study the medieval iconography of the ‘Ages of Life.’ Photo: Index of Medieval Art Archives.
A detail of a lined notebook containing multiple signatures in various hands. Each line includes a date, a name, a location, and a research topic. One line is highlighted.
Sears returned twice to the Index in June 1978 to continue her doctoral research on the ‘Ages of Life.’ Photo: Index of Medieval Art Archives.

Have you made any great iconographic discoveries related to your research using the Index? Have you used the Index for teaching as well as for research? 

Here I must go a little beyond the questions posed, owing to my faculty appointment at Princeton and the fact that in the year I was going up for tenure, after Nigel Morgan had left the position, I was asked to serve as Acting Director of the Index (1987-88). Moreover—I suppose I can say it at this point—when the tenure decision came down from Princeton’s “Committee of Three,” I was asked by the Index Committee if I would consider staying on at Princeton in the role of Index Director. I chose another path, grants taking me to Europe, mostly Germany, for four life-changing years. I suppose I had various eureka moments at the Index as both teacher and Acting Director, as it became necessary for me to grasp the structure of the Index in its development from 1917 to the present. This involved thinking about how iconographical knowledge is captured, described, stored, retrieved, and mobilized. In those days the members of the Index Committee, chaired by Michael Curschmann, were concerned about the ICA’s future. It was a time of tumultuous methodological shift (“the crisis in the discipline,” the “New Art History,” the “Social History of Art”) and the worry was that the Index could become irrelevant, questions being posed that it was not designed to answer. It was the era of computerization (pre-www). At one point I met with the Princeton-trained David Packard, of Hewlitt-Packard, who had earlier arranged that a database of classical literature be created. He saw the inherent difficulties of computerizing the Index and, while declining to take it up as a project, offered advice. Nigel Morgan had earlier started in, at a time when Irving Lavin at the Institute for Advanced Study was interested in how the structure of the Index differed from Iconclass, the Dutch system of iconographical classification, wondering if it might provide alternatives.

My mandate was to give the problem of computerization a good hard look. The staff met regularly with a university computer programmer, the poor man embroiled in a project far more complicated than he had anticipated, but the conversations around the table were themselves fascinating. Adelaide Bennett Hagens knew the classification system inside-out of course. Lois Drewer, new to the Index, showed a rare brilliance in grasping structures and identifying the complicating factors. After a time it became clear that it was impossible to do what many were doing when it came time to transfer data from card indexes to databases: shipping the paper records offsite, even to far-off lands, to Malaysia or wherever, to have the data keyed in. It had emerged, as I remember it, that the links between primary and secondary cards were not retrievable (since the secondary motifs described and highlighted on the former had not been cast in the form of the controlled subject headings used on the latter), and so the data would all have to be freshly entered into newly devised templates. I recall a visit to the Jewish Museum in New York to see a demonstration of the computerized Index of Jewish Art given by Bezalel Narkiss. After my time, I heard that the IJA’s Aleph program, devised in Tel Aviv, was adapted for use at the Index of Christian Art for a good while.

While at the Index, I believe I became more methodologically aware. It fell to the director to share in the task of answering iconographical queries, which made me more knowledgeable about the Index system, and while sitting in the corner office in McCormick Hall, I had need and opportunity to examine historical files. This was the juncture at which, independently, I was beginning to develop a second line of study, disciplinary historiography. In those years I wrote my first such essay: “The Life and Work of William S. Heckscher: Some Petites perceptions” (1990). Heckscher had settled in Princeton after retirement, so I saw him regularly and could formally interview him. I began to think of writing something on the Index itself and started gathering information. Some years later, with Adelaide Bennett Hagens, I interviewed the great former director, Rosalie Green, at her home. Her recollections enabled me to write the article “Under Miss Green’s Watch: Three Decades of Art History at the Index of Christian Art” for Adelaide’s Festschrift (2017), which celebrated her 50 years at the Index.1

When at Princeton, I routinely used the Index in teaching. It served graduate students as a tool, but one they learned to examine critically. I found that undergraduates, through use of the Index, could be introduced to the pleasures of conducting research with primary materials. Nigel Morgan and Robert Melzak both helped by suggesting feasible topics. Among the most memorable papers I received was one on the marginal motif of wrestling figures, this theme tackled by a muscular undergraduate on Princeton’s wrestling team. His approach was to analyze postures and holds and his conclusion was that these were impossibly fictional, that the wrestlers would have fallen over.

A black and white photograph depicting a woman and a man bending over an open file cabinet and looking at index cards. Bookshelf and card catalog in the background. In the foreground, a table with books and desk lamp.
 
Erwin Panofsky and Rosalie Green at the Index of Christian Art, c. 1960. Photo: Index of Medieval Art Archives.

Have you attended or presented at an Index conference? Which conferences were particularly memorable or helpful to your work? 

I have presented at two. One was the excellent conference Romanesque: Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century, organized by Colum Hourihane as a tribute to Walter Cahn. I delivered the opening talk, on “The Art-Historical Work of Walter Cahn,” having earlier made my way to New Haven with a tape recorder to interview him. He had on that occasion spoken openly about his life, and accordingly I incorporated biographical details into an attempt to define what was “Cahnian” in his published work. He, his wife, and his brother were present at the event, along with friends, colleagues, and students, which was daunting. But I had never before had so rapt an audience. As many afterward said, they had known virtually nothing about his childhood and adolescence in Germany and France. The second conference in which I participated was Iconography Beyond the Crossroads: Image, Meaning, and Method in Medieval Art, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Index and its rechristening as the Index of Medieval Art. My opening lecture “Iconography and Iconology at Princeton” formed something of a prequel and pendant to Madeline Caviness’s concluding talk, “Iconography Deconstructed, from Mâle to the Alt Right.”2

Do you have any observations about the evolution of the Index files and database over the last three decades? Where do you think Index work should go next? 

In many ways, in view of the ever-shifting currents in the field and the constant change in university and departmental administrators, the endurance of the Index from 1917 to the present is astonishing. The present team at the Index seems to be playing an increasingly prominent role in medieval studies writ large, in a wholly admirable way, and the database seems to be now radically rationalized. Back in 1938 it was thought that the Index could be “completed” in 10 years’ time, which now seems comical, but the goal of systematic coverage in given categories, I would think, remains key. In the early days, pre-computer, when iconographical study rested on the discovery of sources and analogues, whether to track motifs over time or to decipher pictorial programs, art historians would often say they went to the Index only to see if they had missed something. But onsite visits also meant that cataloguers’ expertise and memory could be tapped, which was the really useful thing, allowing creative work. The staff took pride, for example, in helping Michael Camille gather strewn evidence for The Gothic Idol. The online database, I imagine, remains daunting to the neophyte. The Index team can only continue to do its all to teach teachers, as well researchers, how the Index may be played as an instrument—one making possible the discovery of imagery that can serve as witness to socio-religio-cultural beliefs and behaviors. It has always been a matter of ordering data to best align with questions that are being, or might be, posed.


  1. The subtitle, of course, was a play on Panofsky’s famous autobiographical essay (“Three Decades of Art History in the United States: Impressions of a Transplanted European,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts, 1955). Panofsky worked closely with Miss Green over the years, a phone call sufficing to have a query answered: “instant iconography,” they called it. ↩︎
  2. Elizabeth Sears, “Iconography and Iconology at Princeton,” in Iconography Beyond the Crossroads: Image, Meaning, and Method in Medieval Art, ed. by Pamela A. Patton and Catherine A. Fernandez (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2022), 9–34; Madeline H. Caviness, “Iconography Deconstructed, from Mâle to the Alt Right,” in Iconography Beyond the Crossroads, 195–222. ↩︎

A Grateful Thread: Finishing Textile Cataloging in the Index Photo Archive

A photograph of a pair of gloves decorated with roundels and trim, placed flat on a red mount, and behind display glass. A work of art above on the wall. In the foreground right, a mobile phone screen shows the same item in the Index of Medieval Art database.
Using the Index database while on site in Italy and viewing the Gloves of San Sabino (Italy, 1101), Museo dei Vescovi, Canosa di Puglia. Index System number mar20250611001.
Photo: Maria Alessia Rossi. 

In advance of our upcoming move to the new Princeton University Art Museum, we’ve been combing through our print photo cards to ensure that we have completed the research and online cataloging of some of the archival “Medium” categories in our backfiles. Ivory, Gold Glass, and Leather are already fully online, and we’re now happy to report all textiles recorded in the card catalog have now been added to the online database! 

Some of our recent additions and highlights include: 

  • A fragment of a Coptic tunic depicting possibly Alexander the Great (Egypt or Syria, 600–799), The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum, 11.18; Index System number jls20250619001
  • The Merovingian Chasuble of Chelles (650–80), Chelles, Musée Alfred Bonno, inv. 21.001.700; Index System number caf20250526001.  
  • The Alexander Mantle (Alexandra, Constantinople or Syria, 780–820), Benediktinerabtei Ottobeuren; Index System number jls20250711002.  
  • The David Silk (Davidzijde) from a group of Maaseik Embroideries (England or Meuse River Valley, ca. 850), Sint-Catharinakerk, Maaseik; Index System number jls20250715001.  
  • The Överhogdal Tapestries (Sweden, 1040–1170), Jamtli, Östersund; Index System number jls20250717001.  
  • The Cope of Saint-Mexme (Egypt or Spain, 1080–1199), Le Carroi, Chinon; Index System number jls20250630002.  
  • The Gloves of San Sabino (Italy, 1101), Museo dei Vescovi, Canosa; Index System number mar20250611001.  
  • The Zehdenicker Altartuch (Lower Saxony, ca. 1300), Märkisches Museum, Berlin; Index System number jls20250708001.   
  • A pair of Passion of Christ tapestries in La Seo (Flanders or Artois, 1400–30), Cathedral of La Seo, Zaragoza; Index System numbers pap20250717001 and pap20250708001.  
  • A Christ of Sorrows textile triptych mounted on wood (France, ca. 1400), Chartres, Musée des Beaux-Arts; Index System number caf20250721001.  
  • A tapestry depicting Personifications of Virtues and Vices in Conflict, Wild Men, and a Castle of Love type (Strasbourg, ca. 1420), Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Gew3807; Index System number jls20250620002.  
  • Post-Byzantine Epitaphioi from Mount Athos, including from the Dionysiou Monastery (1545); Index System number hds20250710001, and Docheiariou Monastery (1604–05); Index System number hds20250716001
  • A post-Byzantine white silk omophorion in the Grottaferrata Monastery Museum (1618); Index System number mar20250707002

There are over 2600 database records of medieval textiles in the Index database. They offer a representative selection of many different forms of textile arts, including works made in the specific materials of silk, linen, and wool, as well as the techniques of weaving, embroidery, brocade, tapestry, and more. Several ecclesiastical vestments can be found by browsing the “Work of Art Type” list by name, such as chasuble, cope, and pallium. Another useful type to browse is “Hanging,” which is used as a broad category for textiles displayed on walls. 

Many thanks to all the research staff who pitched in to wrap up this category, and to Index Administrator Fiona Barrett for organizing the textile files still in need of research attention. We hope you find these recent textile additions to the Index database useful for your research. Please do not hesitate to send us an inquiry via this linked form with questions about your research in medieval art history. We wish you many happy iconographic discoveries, in textiles and beyond! 

Embroidered on a textile, several figures, including angels, surround the corpse of a bearded man. Mostly comprising red, green, and gold threads.
Bewailing of Christ, embroidered epitaphios, Docheiariou Monastery, Mount Athos (1604–05). Index System number hds20250716001.

Next Online Database Tutorial: 7 October 2025

Detail of a framed manuscript miniature containing a man playing the bagpipes, against a red ground.
Musician playing bagpipe, manuscript miniature, Cantigas de Santa María, Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial, MS B.I.2, fol. 313v (Seville, 1280-1300). Photo: RBME. Patrimonio Nacional (Index system no. pap20250730036)

Please join us and register for the next virtual database tutorial with the Index on Tuesday, October 7, 2025 from 10:00 – 11:00 am EDT.

Graduate Student Conference Travel Grant for “Art and Proof in the Ninth Century”

Detail of a manuscript page with a large red triangle laid over a field of Latin letters.
Hrabanus Maurus, In honorem sanctae crucis, Fulda or Mainz, 820–840. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 652, fol. 17v, det.

The organizers of the upcoming Index conference “Art and Proof in the Ninth Century” are pleased to offer a student travel grant to attend the conference in person. The grant will support attendance by one non-Princeton student who wishes to attend the conference but lacks the financial resources to do so. Up to $500 will be offered in reimbursement for travel and accommodations. Preference will be given to students whose institutions do not offer travel funding, who are not currently supported by a research fellowship, and who would be traveling from outside a 120-mile radius of Princeton. The grantee will be invited to participate in all aspects of the conference, including the speaker lunch, and to pursue research at the Index if their visit schedule permits.

Applicants are asked to send a letter of application that identifies their institutional affiliation, year of study, and research area. They should describe how attending the conference will contribute to their studies, identifying the relevance of the conference topic to their own research and the speakers in whose work they are most interested. They should affirm that they do not have institutional or fellowship funding to support their travel to the conference, and they may, if they wish, include other details about factors that make such travel prohibitive for them. They should append a c.v. and the name of an advisor or other faculty member who is willing to be contacted about their application. Please send all relevant materials to fionab@princeton.edu no later than October 1, 2025.

Checkmate! Ivory Cataloging from the Photo Archive is Now Complete

A hand holding a mobile phone showing the database record of the Index of Medieval Art as the image of an ivory object and metadata. To the right, behind museum display glass and printed label, the same ivory object is displayed on a mount.
Using the Index database while viewing an ivory panel with the martyrdom of an unknown saint (Spain, 1050–1100) in the Met Cloisters. Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 17.190.142. Index System number pap20220421001. Photo: Jessica Savage.

This summer the Index of Medieval Art achieved a milestone in our cataloging mission: the completion of all ivory objects in our print photo archive. In all, more than three thousand objects from the Index’s card catalog have been added to the Index database, significantly enhancing the online collection and establishing the Index as a more vital resource for the study of medieval ivories. The new records include chess pieces, croziers, caskets, combs, retables, diptychs, triptychs, polyptychs, knife handles, mirror cases, oliphants, pyxides, statuettes, and much more! Many of the works of art date to the Gothic period, but late antique, early medieval, Romanesque, Carolingian, Siculo-Arabic, and Byzantine works are also well represented. The materials and techniques categorized as “ivory” were also surprisingly diverse, including carvings in walrus tusk, also known as morse, as well as in horn, bone, antler, and even a ceremonial staff made from narwhal tusk.1

The ivory cataloging project was begun shortly after staff returned to in-person work during the later stages of the pandemic. Index research staff worked from inventories of the photo files made by former student assistant Michele Mesi in 2019.2 Many of the photo files dated from the 1930s to 1950s, and they usually provided a subject and photograph with a bibliographic reference, though sometimes they included much less! Working from the clues left by earlier generations of Indexers, the current crew shared key publications and relied when possible on databases, such as the Courtauld Institute’s Gothic Ivories Project, to work through the records alphabetically by location and collection.3

 Carved ivory statuette of a veiled woman, wearing long belted garment, holding a male child in her left arm and a bud of a flower in her other hand. The statuette is on a wooden base surrounded by flowers. Some surface cracks and yellowing are present on the statue.
The Madonna del Fiore ivory statuette (Paris or Provence, 1280–1349), Museo Diocesano di Rieti. Photograph: Associazione di festeggiamenti di Lugnano, Rieti (shared with kind permission). Index System number jls20230203001.

Sometimes we found research clues in unorthodox sources. While researching an early fourteenth-century statue of the Virgin and Child, known as the Madonna del Fiore, Art History Specialist Jessica Savage found images shared by the Associazione di Festeggiamenti di Lugnano, Rieti on Facebook. According to the association’s website, the statue is mounted on a gilded decorative support and processed through the streets of Lugnano during the “Festa della Madonna del Fiore” every first Sunday of September.4 It was fascinating to see the medieval relic in celebratory use to this day, and it is just as easy to imagine the lives of these various objects as they were gifted, traded, used, venerated, and now discoverable online with the Index database–many digitized for the first time.

Many of the objects and fragments on which we worked had been dispersed either before or after their records were created, and some items or even whole collections had changed hands. Sometimes this provoked unexpected collaborations: in one case, Art History Specialist Maria Alessia Rossi cataloged the right wing of a diptych in the Musée de Cluny depicting the Coronation and Dormition of the Virgin, and then, about a year later, Savage found the other wing, with the adjoining scenes of the Last Judgment and Adoration of the Magi, separately cataloged in the file of the Paris Cabinet des Médailles. The diptych wings are now digitally reunited as Index System number mar20230306003.

Reflecting on the ivories project, Index Director Pamela Patton said, “One of the most exciting things about cataloging the ivory backfiles was the chance to bring elements of a single object that had been dispersed over time into a single work of art record, as for the Casket of Saint Emilianus (San Millán), a reliquary made in the eleventh century but damaged when the monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla was sacked in 1089.” Some of the ivory plaques remain in the monastery, but others were dispersed to at least seven different museums in Europe and the United States. Patton recalled, “Bringing together images and metadata for all these works, including one plaque that was lost in World War II but preserved in a German photograph, was a very satisfying endeavor.”

A modern footed casket set with eleven medieval ivory plaques depicting figures and animals, some in architectural settings.
Modern reconstruction of the San Millán Casket, back. Index System number pap20220413001.

Byzantine rosette caskets were another category that some researchers may find intriguing. Art History Specialist Henry D. Schilb created a record for the Hermitage Museum’s inv. no. Ѡ17, now Index System number hds20250128001, one of a group of similar caskets cataloged by the Index over the years, with examples in the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt (inventory number Kg 54:219, Index System number 77286) and the Cleveland Museum of Art (inventory number 1924.747, Index System number 77285). Known for the prominent use of rosette ornament, this group of caskets has also attracted the attention of no less eminent a scholar than Princeton alumnus Justin Willson, whose recent article discusses why we find among scenes of Adam and Eve the figure of Plutus holding a moneybag.5

BERJAYA
Eve, Plutus, and Adam, ivory rosette casket (Byzantine Empire, 975–1025), State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Ѡ17, left side. Index System number hds20250128001.

New iconographic subjects encountered during our work on ivories were sometimes added to the Index database during cataloging. For example, the bust portrait of “Ulpia Sirica,” a second or fourth century woman from Rome, was discovered by Rossi in the ivory files. The only known depiction of Ulpia on this opus sectile-style plaque, made of marble, blue and green enamels, glass paste, and painted bone and ivory listels, was buried by a landslide in the late 1900s. Her portrait is last known to have been embedded in a Latin epitaph in the Catacombs of Saint Agnes in Rome; it is preserved in a late nineteenth-century watercolor by Salvatore Merola, kept in the diary of Ubaldo Giordani.6

Drawing of a bust of a female figure within a rectangular frame surrounded by a hexagonal frame.
A bust portrait of Ulpia Sirica, and a late nineteenth-century watercolor by Salvator Merola of an inlay plaque in an epitaph, last known in the Catacombs of Saint Agnes, Rome. Index System number mar20250513001.

Additionally, the little-known female saints “Oderade of Quedlinburg,” “Agnes II of Quedlinburg,” and “Pusinna, Saint” inspired new iconographic research by Art History Specialist Catherine Fernandez during her work on the Reliquary of St. Servatius now housed in the Stift Quedlinburg, Domschatz. The rarely depicted religious women, a prioress, abbess, and hermit, respectively, appear in an iconographic grouping, or relic list, with other saints on the bottom enamel panel of the Reliquary of St. Servatius. The ivory reliquary was made in Fulda or Metz around 870 with gem and metalwork additions ca. 1300.

BERJAYA
Lid and obverse panel of the Reliquary of St. Servatius, left, and, on the right, Agnes II and Oderade of Quedlinburg with St. Pusinna and other saints on the bottom enamel panel of the reliquary (Fulda or Metz, ca. 870 and ca. 1300), Stift Quedlinburg, Domschatz. Index System number caf20241217001.

The ivory cataloging project produced a new authority in the Style/Culture category. We added the heading “Forgery” to describe objects that, although executed in a “medieval” style, were actually—and often with deceptive intent—produced by more modern artists.7 The project also required the verification of a great many locations, part of Schilb’s ongoing project to make the location data used by the Index as accurate and precise as possible.

A composite image with the joined up representations of two carved statues of a crowned woman holding a male infant and mounted on a base. On the left, the statue is depicted in black and white and on the right the statue is shown in color.
A Virgin and Child ivory statuette thought to be made in the late nineteenth century. On the left, the Index’s archival photograph taken from the Josephi catalog, Kataloge des Germanischen Nationalmuseums Nürnberg (1910). On the right, a modern image by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (inventory number Pl.O.367). Index System number jls20250207006.

Indexers celebrated the completion of the ivories project with all staff at an in-house celebration that featured appropriately pale but delectable treats (popcorn, burrata, white chocolate-covered almonds, vanilla meringues!) and offered a chance to reminisce about highlights from the project.8 Many more ivory objects remain to be cataloged by the Index in years to come, but for now we are thrilled to make available online all the objects that have been cataloged by the Index to date. We acknowledge there might still be missing or outdated information on some of these records. Sometimes images could not be tracked down, current locations could not be verified, or works were presumed lost or destroyed. Our cataloging efforts will always be a work in progress, and we remain open to your corrections, suggestions, and questions.

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  1. See the early twelfth-century ceremonial staff carved with animals and foliate decoration and made of narwhal tusk (London, Victoria and Albert Museum, A.79-1936), with the Index System number jls20220524001. ↩︎
  2. In 2019, Michele Mesi and Ryan Gerber were summer student assistants from Rutgers University who contributed to the documentation of the Index photo files. See further their experiences and reflections in a pair of Index blog posts, Exploring the Photographic Archive of The Index, Part 1 and Part 2. ↩︎
  3. The most often cited catalogues in the ivory backfiles were Alfred Maskell, Ivories (London: 1905), Adolph Goldschmidt, Die Elfenbeinskulpturen aus der Zeit der karolingischen und sächsischen Kaiser, VIII. – XI. Jahrhundert (Berlin: 1918-1926), and Raymond Koechlin, Les ivoires gothiques français (Paris: 1924). ↩︎
  4. See fascinating images of this procession of the “Madonna del Fiore” through the streets of Lugnano on the website of the Associazione di Festeggiamenti di Lugnano, Rieti. ↩︎
  5. Willson, Justin, “The Origin of the Crafts According to Byzantine Rosette Caskets,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 27 no. 2 (2020): 197–215, figs. 2 and 5. ↩︎
  6. Archivio della Canonica di Sant’Agnese, Ubaldo Giordani, Diario di scavi nel cimitero di Sant’Agnese intorno alla sua basilica (1865–1891), p. 130. ↩︎
  7. A number of ivory objects ended up tagged as forgeries, including a nineteenth-century Italian ivory plaque with a curious grouping of saints, possibly showing scenes from the life of St. Agnes. This plaque is now in the Art Institute of Chicago, inv. no. 1943.61, with the Index System number pap2024052001. ↩︎
  8. It ought to be noted that the Index staff would never forego an opportunity to throw a party with snacks! ↩︎