Issue 82: The Materiality of Art in Pre-Modern Central and Eastern Europe.

Submission deadline: 31 May 2026
Publication date: December 2026
Editor: Prof. Dr Aleksandra Lipińska

The history of pre-modern art, long focused on questions of form and content, has over the past three decades increasingly turned its attention to the material aspects of artefacts, as part of the material turn and practical turn. As a result of this intensification of research, we now have a deeper understanding not only of the properties of specific materials and the history of their application and artistic techniques, but also of how materiality contributes to the meaning of objects and shapes their reception.

The circulation of materials and technological know-how is now studied as a crucial component of intercultural exchange, as are the representational strategies of patrons and artists. At the same time, growing recognition of the embodied knowledge of craftsmen and artists has made it possible to examine processes of artefact production from perspectives that go beyond those offered by declarative and normative treatise literature. Multidisciplinary research conducted in collaboration with conservators and natural scientists—characteristic of technical art history—provides data that enable the verification of established art-historical theses and the formulation of new research questions. Experimental reconstructions of historical techniques, long employed in archaeology, have likewise yielded valuable insights. Finally, approaches to materiality informed by ecocritical perspectives allow us to reconstruct historical attitudes toward nature and assess their consequences.

Art history today thus has at its disposal a wide range of methods and perspectives that can significantly enrich our understanding of pre-modern art in Central and Eastern Europe and its transregional connections. The planned issue of Quart aims to map this field of research. We therefore invite submissions, including those authored by interdisciplinary teams, addressing, among other topics, the following issues:
- Materials occurring in or imported into Central and Eastern Europe, and their circulation and application
- Historical art techniques, their reconstruction, and their perception by contemporaries
- Attitudes toward the materiality of objects and the narratives constructed on this basis
- The exploitation of materials and production techniques from an ecocritical perspective
-The historiography of research on the materiality of works of art in Central and Eastern Europe

Articles (20,000–40,000 characters, in Polish or English, with up to 10 illustrations) should be prepared in accordance with the journal’s stylesheet (available at: https://czasopisma.uwr.edu.pl/quart/for-authors) and submitted to quartuwr.edu.pl by 31 May 2026. The editors reserve the right to select from among the submitted texts. All articles will be subject to a double-blind peer-review process.