Representing Re-Formation: the search for objectivity
Phillip Lindley, PI of the Representing Re-Formation Project funded by the Science and Heritage Programme. Reader in Art History at the University of Leicester
In this talk I want to consider the historical background to the attempt to record the three-dimensional object in visual form as a tool for cognition, with a few historical case studies. Then I shall sketch out the aims of the ‘Representing Re-Formation’ project, concentrating particularly on its central focus and some of the problems which I want to solve – the relationship between the monuments of the Howard dukes of Norfolk and their family at Framlingham in Suffolk, and the closely related fragments excavated on the site of Thetford Priory, some forty miles away. Until the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Thetford Priory had been the dynastic mausoleum of the dukes of Norfolk, but after the dissolution the third duke decided on a new burial place at Framlingham, where the east end of the parish church was rebuilt on a substantial scale to house the ducal monuments. Earlier scholars, notably Sir Howard Colvin, Professor Lawrence Stone and, more recently, Professor Richard Marks, have done much to clarify the status of the Howard monuments. Marks’s hypothesis that the monuments of the third duke and of the Duke of Richmond are two-phase objects is convincing. Now we are trying to virtually disassemble the monuments, to test earlier theories as to their appearance, and to reconstruct them virtually as they were intended, but never completed, in 1539, on the brink of Thetford Priory’s dissolution.
Speaker Biography
Phillip Lindley trained as an Art Historian at Cambridge. I held a scholarship at Downing College, where I was awarded a Bye Fellowship during my doctoral work, and subsequently moved to St Catharine’s College as a Research Fellow. Later I held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at York and have been at Leicester since 1991. I have a strong interest in interdisciplinary research, initially stimulated by working with sculpture conservators at the Victoria and Albert Museum and at the Conservation Centre in Liverpool (where I first learned about 3-D scanning and laser ablation of pollution), and by collaborating with historians and archaeologists, as well as by curating exhibitions such as Image & Idol at Tate Britain in 2001-2. The interdisciplinary nature of Oxbridge Colleges provided me with an excellent model for academic exchange and cross-pollenation of ideas.
I direct the ‘Representing Re-Formation’ project, and conceived the idea of applying 3D scanning for the recording, digital dismantling and conjectural virtual reassembly of the Howard monuments at Framlingham. I am also responsible for convening this symposium. Most of my research has been into Late Medieval and Early Modern Art and Architecture, with a particular focus on sculpture, but I am currently becoming interested in Landscape Archaeology and the virtual reconstruction of lost formal gardens.
