"Empty Spaces, Gaps and Omissions in medieval art"
Call for papers to Issue 57 of „Quart” (September 2020)
Special editor of the issue: Dr. Agnieszka Patała

The art of the broadly understood Middle Ages seems to be marked by aversion to empty spots, spatial gaps and incompleteness. Such an attitude is common to all epochs of old art, however, the all-pervasive fear of emptiness is considered to be one of the important impulses affecting artists and commissioners especially in the Middle Ages, in their efforts to i.a. tightly fill manuscript cards with painted illuminations, or temple walls with monumental paintings and a wealth of sculptural decorations. Meanwhile, it is impossible to ignore and marginalize the presence of empty spaces, gaps and more or less intentional omissions in the visual sphere of medieval Europe and blame only the inattentive or less talented artists, or the destructive effect of the passing of time for their occurrence. Empty spaces, regardless whether they were intentional or not, can speak very loudly, can give new meanings and senses or change the existing ones, can constitute a new form of not necessarily physical presence or a source of concrete information, and finally can talk about various, not only physical, gaps and deficiencies.

Submitted papers, being theoretical deliberations, outlining wider phenomena or being case studies, may, yet not necessarily, discuss the following topics:
• Empty spaces, gaps and omissions in the physical, compositional, iconographic, ideological and content layers of works and spaces as their integral part and/or the effect of intentional actions, manipulation, erasure of memory, and the result of pure chance,
• the phenomenon of the disappearance of awareness, and memory of the incompleteness of works and space,
• absence, nothingness, non-representation as immanent features of the visual culture of specific areas, times, given artistic environments,
• gaps, omissions and processes of erasing memory in research on medieval art and present in its collecting and exhibiting, as well as in source accounts from the period and in later historical and artistic literature.

Papers (from 20,000 to 40,000 characters, in Polish or English, with up to 7 illustrations) should be submitted in accordance with the indicated deadlines and in the format specified in the guidelines (to be downloaded from the website: http://quart.uni.wroc.pl/wytyczne.html) to: quartuwr.edu.pl

The editors reserve the right to select given papers. All the submitted papers will be subject to a double-blind review, in line with COPE guidelines.

Deadline for submission of papers: 5 June 2020
The issue will be published in the 2nd half of September 2020


"Quart" is a regularly published quarterly journal by the Institute of Art History of the University of Wroclaw. It is indexed in ERIH+, CEJSH and BazHum databases. It was awarded a grant under the "Support for 500 Scientific Journals" Programme of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. It is included in the list of scientific journals of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education as of 31.07.2019 with 20 points. The current number can be purchased in EMPiK chain stores. Archival issues are available in libraries and in a digitalized form on the Polona website: https://polona.pl/search/?query=quart.