Album amicorum : Till-Holger Borchert

On Wednesday, 11 June, our team had the pleasure of attending an online conference by Till-Holger Borchert, during which the German art historian shared his insights on the function of portraiture and representation between 1400 and 1530. Borchert is a specialist in painting and illuminations from the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth century. His has worked on various aspects of portraiture and representation in Northern Europe. Currently the director of the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum Aachen, he has previously worked in Bruges for more than twenty years. He has curated for numerous exhibitions in Belgium, Europe and in the United States. Moreover, he is the author of several books, including Van Eyck, first published by Taschen in 2008, and Peinture flamande : de Van Eyck à Rubens published by Citadelles & Mazenod in 2014.

For starters: what is the place of the notion of the present in your everyday life as a researcher? 

There are various notions of the present : a friend – who died a few years ago – used to say : “The present is called present because it’s a present.” The older I get, the more meaningful this sentence becomes. And if only because the present seems always to be way too short.

The other aspect for me is timelessness of art : whenever I am studying original works of art – be that in a museum, a church of a library – I feel like I leave the present ; I don’t think that I approach the past but often enter in a concentrated state of mind that allows me to blend out the environment and be in a state of tan extended moment which is neither past nor present.

What is your expertise and in what way does your research engage with the notions of time, temporality and/or the present? 

I am an art historian and specialize in Europen (and mostly Northern European) art of the 14th to the early 16th century. I am trying to understand those works of art I am interested in – not in terms of absolute criteria but to approach and interpret them within their own terms, at least as much as that’s humanly possible. The reality is – and has been for me for a long time – that notions and concepts seemingly inherent to my own time inform and even command my perspective and interpretations on the past and vice versa. I began to understand certain conditions of medieval workshop practices by looking at Warhol’s factory and i have understand the involvement of Haliburton in Irak by studying the routier-compagnies of the Hundred years war.

What kind of sources do you use in your research on time, temporality and/or the present? 

As I am not a trained historian, I have to restrict myself to published source-material which is in itself an interpretation of the documents that occured in a specific timeframe. This is particularly true for those impressive editions that erudite scholars of the 19th century have compiled and which seem to be impossible to achieve today. These I have tried to see as source material for aspects of art history’s historiography as well as – not always as cautiously as I should have –  the transition between Late Middle ages and Early Modern Times. My main source material is visual in nature and I try to study as much material in the original as possible, ideally more than once. This is a time-consuming and costly occupation which limits the time of writing. One particular aspect I am interested in is the depiction and understanding of the past in (mostly) 15th century art. The antiquarian meta-painting by Van Eyck – i.e. his depiction of 13th century wall painting in some of his images or the use of Carolingia letter types – but also the pictoria notions of antiquity in illustrated chronicles of the Burgundian court.

Are there any specific theorists about time that you are particularly drawn to? And/or: Have you recently encountered another project or researcher who is of particular interest regarding this topic? 

I always found the writings of the British Art Historians like Michael Baxandall (Giotto and the Orators ; The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany) and Francis Haskell  (Taste and Antiquity and History and its Images) very inspiring; then Alexander Nagel (Anachronic Renaissance) but also some of the writings of the historian Simon Schama (Landscape and Memory). Among the more modern and (from my point of view) interdisciplinary texts was enrichment : Une critique de la marchandise by Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre.

Do you think it is possible to speak of a shared perception of time or of the present at a specific historic moment (one of our research questions)? 

This is a particulary interesting question which is hard to answer. I think the shared liturgical calendar of the Catholic church could be an example but also the ambivalent revival of traditions such as the Carneval during the 19th century and other memorial events – anniversaries of wars, catastrophies, artists, ceremonies (often now labelled as immaterial heritage such as the Holy Blood procession in Bruges) and cultural canonizations.

Finally, what would be your ‘research utopia’ if finances and time were not an issue?

A time machine… but seriously : I think it could be – by kind of experiment – kind of interesting if a research project would exclusively feed all remaining textual and visual documents from a specified time and place to Artificial intelligence and then compare answers to question to our answers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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