Evan A. Gatti, associate professor of art history and associate director of the Elon Core Curriculum, presented "Frescoes in Fragments: What material loss allows us to see" at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.
The goal of the conference was to examine, question, and build upon recent work on materiality. Organizers sought papers that would discuss the ways in which early medieval people experienced, altered, and were transformed by the material.
Gatti’s paper asked what we should do with materiality that no longer remains by examining fragments of 11th-century frescoes that survive in the attics of two churches in Aosta, Italy. While the stories of these frescoes are not unique — many churches lost early medieval interiors to later modern alterations — Gatti argued a closer study of these examples records how and why material evidence survives as well as the meanings behind neglect or decay. The micro-histories of these objects encourage us not to think of material loss as a problem to overcome but as losses to see, Gatti said.