Tamara Golan

Biography

Tamara Golan studies and teaches medieval and early modern art from northern Europe. She specializes in the visual and material culture of Switzerland and southern Germany, and her interests range from the intersections of art, science, and the law; paradigms of expertise; artistic fraud and deception; and questions of materiality.

She is currently at work on her first book, which investigates the role played by legal definitions of evidence in the development of pictorial naturalism in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Swiss art. This project explores how artists from this region addressed the growing desire to test and verify the sacred through forensic examination of the natural world, charting the increasingly vexed relationship between human artifice and its evidentiary status on the eve of the Reformation. Viewed broadly, her account provides an alternative history of naturalistic painting, showing how questions of representation could be determined by legal considerations. Her other research projects include studies of the relationship between juridical discourse on the body and the political lives of reliquaries; the fraught legacy of late medieval artists in East Germany; the impact of confessional reform on altarpiece production; and Swiss mercenary artists.

Golan received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University and her MA from Tufts University. She has previously held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and the Max-Planck Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence.
 

Publications

“The Dominican High Altar in Bern and the Failure of Iconography” Studies in Iconography vol. 43 (2022): 103–145.

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ut experiri et scire posset: Pictorial Evidence and Judicial Inquiry in Hans Fries’ Kleiner Johannes Altar” in The Art of Law: Artistic Representations and Iconography of Law & Justice in Context from the Middle Ages to the First World War, eds. Georges Martyn, Vanessa Paumen, and Stefan Huygebaert (Springer Press, 2018), 319–336.

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Profiles

Andrei Pop
Andrei Pop
Modern Art and Aesthetics
Department Chair
CWAC 162 | Tuesdays 1-2pm or by appointment.
773.702.0278
Niall Atkinson
Niall Atkinson
Medieval and Renaissance Architecture and Urban History
CWAC 260
773.702.0270
Wei-Cheng Lin
Wei-Cheng Lin
Chinese Art and Architecture
Architectural Studies Advisor
CWAC 268 | Office Hours: Wednesdays 9-10am and 12-1pm
773.702.0268
2006-07
Iowa State University
Assistant Professor, East Asian Art and Architecture
Potters Wheel
Richard Neer
Ancient Greek Art and Architecture
CWAC 259
773.702.5890
Megan Sullivan
Megan Sullivan
Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art
CWAC 272
773.702.5126