Exhibition Talk: “What are the filthy apes doing there?”: Animals, Nature, and the Medieval Artistic Imagination

Dr. C. Griffith Mann, Michel David-Weill Curator in
Charge of Medieval Art and The Cloisters at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, will discuss the varied attitudes
toward the visual arts during the height of the European
Middle Ages with an emphasis on the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries. Especially in the context of church and monastic communities, the role of art and its intersection with religious experience was often hotly debated. Using selected objects from the DMA's exhibition Art and Nature in the Middle Ages as a point of departure, Mann will explore the contexts that shaped the production of works of art, as well as the audiences these works addressed.