“The depicted door,” Jas Elsner has written of the fourth century Pola Casket, “is a kind of makebelieve that might open into the box or out of which the box’s contents might venture.” The doors of the ivory casket suggest an architectural space, but one that remains wholly impenetrable to anything but the imagination. Inspired by the recent focus on absconded or hidden art objects, this panel will address the inaccessible architectures of the medieval world to ask: how do we understand space we cannot enter?
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