Every Sunday from May 3 to 24, 2026, Kumler will focus on difficulty as an aesthetic strategy, value, and theme in medieval European art. The lectures expand upon one of the central topics of Kumler’s scholarly research: how the material conditions of life shape people’s thought, imagination, and actions.

Art made for and by European medieval Christians has often been associated with religious and aesthetic values of certainty, clarity, and transcendence. Kumler argues that, instead, a long tradition of medieval art offers viewers perceptual and conceptual encounters with ambiguity, obscurity, and contingency. Attending to this neglected tradition of difficult, often self-reflexive images, Kumler’s lectures will explore how medieval works of art position difficulty as a virtue, asking what was at stake and reflecting on its implications for our understanding of medieval art today.

Aden Kumler is professor of art history in the Department of Arts, Media, Philosophy at Universität Basel and director of eikones, Center for the Theory and History of the Image. Her research interests are thematically and historically wide-ranging, but a key tenet of her work surrounds how the material conditions of life shape people’s thought, imagination, and actions. Kumler’s first book, Translating Truth: Ambitious Images and Religious Knowledge in Late Medieval France and England (2011), examines the interplay of manuscript illumination and vernacular texts in 13th- and 14th-century France and England. It was awarded a Medieval Academy of America book subvention and was short-listed for the ACE/Mercer’s International Book Award. Her work also focuses on Christian liturgical objects in the context of practice, ritual prescriptions, and theological concepts in the Middle Ages, as well as contemporary problems of methodology and image theory. A new area of her research explores the influential role of images, artworks, and artifacts in the formation of historical conceptions of labor, property, value, and authenticity.