Materials, Materia, "Materiality"

This chapter describes the recent emergence of “materiality” as a central and vexed term in medieval art history. It outlines several lines of inquiry that could further transform the understanding of the role and import of materials, and ideas about materials, in the art of the Middle Ages. The chapter sketches several dominant approaches from a much larger body of work on the role and import of materials in Romanesque and Gothic Europe. The medieval search for significationes in material things was profoundly authorized by conceptions of divinely authored meaning immanent in creation and polysemously referenced in scripture. Materials were understood to be potent vestigia of the divine presence in creation. In the Middle Ages, the practice of ars invariably involved the laborious, often re‐iterative transformation of natural substances into the materials or Werkstoffe required to realize an artwork, object, or monument.