To browse Academia. After four years, the colloquium in Barcelona offers us an opportunity finally to meet in person. As I write, in March , the occasion seems more and more possible. Can any colloquium ever have been more welcome in prospect? This is the second colloquium in the region, and both featured or will feature that extraordinary survival of the medieval glaziers' craft, the glazing tables in Girona Cathedral.
Bringing together thinking and making, the theme is also appropriate to a joint session of the colloquium and the forum for conservation, about the tables. Across almost the whole new, broad timescale of our project, from the middle ages to the twentieth century, the programme promises stimulating insights into the relationship between the materials and settings for the medium that we study, and very different cultural environments, with different ways of making art and thinking about its manufacture.
We shall be hearing about pattern books and drawings, artists and glaziers, craft workshop practice and serial production, stained glass and other media, and authorship and the status of those involved in the craft. We look forward with excitement to the many opportunities that are planned for us to explore the stained-glass riches of Barcelona itself, in its city churches, the cathedral and at the Sagrada Familia, and to visiting the Museu del Disseny.
We shall also go to Girona itself to hear about new work on the famous tables. Beyond the formal programme, of course, we anticipate with pleasure the opportunity to meet again in person, on the streets of this great medieval trading city, with its extraordinary history of creativity and international exchange down the centuries. Altogether, it promises to be a wonderful event, for thinking and working together, and for meeting again after years of lockdown.
The interdisciplinary study of ancient materials has become an increasingly common strategy, mainly because it has proved to be a highly rewarding approach to studying the age, provenance and production of archaeological objects. The results of such an approach sometimes also provide answers to questions relating not only to socio-cultural, economic or technological developments in a particular region or period trade, innovation, production etc.
