Envisioning Cluny: Kenneth Conant and Representations of Medieval Architecture, 1872–2025

This exhibition celebrates the study of medieval architecture at Harvard University. While medieval buildings have been continuously studied, the technologies of their visualization, knowledge about them, and the purposes to which this knowledge was and is applied have evolved constantly. The representational means by which architecture can be studied, taught, and envisioned have progressed from photographs, drawings, and casts to digital images and animations. This tradition, represented by the remarkable holdings used for teaching and research of Harvard University repositories, is illustrated by the works on view. A connective thread of the narrative is Kenneth Conant (1894–1984) who, having received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University, taught architectural history here from 1920 to 1954.

The four sections of the show begin with Conant’s architectural training and formation as a scholar, focusing on the late nineteenth-century adoption of the new medium of photography, important both for medievalizing architectural design and innovative art historical method. The second section features Conant’s work at the third abbey church of the Benedictine monastery at Cluny, built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and almost entirely destroyed following the French Revolution. Believing the church to have been one of the most important and beautiful creations of the Middle Ages, Conant envisioned the original appearance of Cluny III, as it is known today, by embodying meticulously measured remains in compelling graphics vivified by his extraordinary imagination. The exhibition’s third section centers on the eight plaster casts of capitals from Cluny III that Conant commissioned in 1929 and displayed in the Fogg Art Museum until 1936. Plaster casts of famous works of art were the means by which American architects learned the history of their craft, acquired a vocabulary of historical tropes to apply in their own work, and formed their taste by gaining an appreciation for the “best” works. By the 1920s, the canon of artifacts worthy of such study had been extended to cultures previously excluded or ignored, such as the pre-Gothic Middle Ages in Germany and France. The Cluny capital casts exemplify this trend. At this same time, casts became less valued than study of original works: today few of the many casts once on view in the Fogg Art Museum and Robinson Hall, Harvard’s architecture school until 1972, can be seen on campus.

The narrative concludes with recently created 3D digital models of the Cluny capital casts. These high-resolution, photorealistic representations of real-world objects allow students and scholars to engage with surrogates in new ways that suggest previously unimagined possibilities for future scholarship.

Exhibition Curator

Christine Smith, Robert C. and Marion K. Weinberg Professor of Architectural History

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