Awards
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Mitchell B. Merback for Fount of Mercy, City of Blood: Cultic Anti-Judaism and the Pulkau Altarpiece
The Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize is awarded to an outstanding article published in The Art Bulletin by a scholar who is under the age of thirty-five or who has received the doctorate no more than ten years before the acceptance of the article for publication. Since its establishment in 1957, authors of forty-seven articles have been honored with this award, and many of these essays are now considered classics of art-historical writing. The latest prize winner in this distinguished series is Mitchell B. Merback’s “Fount of Mercy, City of Blood: Cultic Anti-Judaism and the Pulkau Altarpiece,” which appeared in the December 2005 issue of the journal.
This is an impressive work of original research, presented with an extraordinary poignancy, a staggering breadth of knowledge, a judicious framing of the argument within the context of previous scholarship, and a tremendous depth of interpretation. Layer by layer, Merback builds a complex and nuanced reading of the Pulkau Altarpiece’s complex program of painting and sculpture, arguing that it can be understood in terms of processes “wherein anti-Jewish persecutions and mythmaking became interlocked with otherwise normative features of Christian shrine construction.” Merback deploys his argument with a commanding level of historical detail, but ease and elegance carry the multiple narrative threads of his profoundly moving story. His article is as much a work of historical reconstruction and interpretation as it is a monument of remembrance, of the bloodshed of cultic anti-Judaism in the fourteenth-century community of Pulkau. He reminds us that these tragic historical episodes have unexpected later resonance. As Merback concludes: “It is culture that marks the site of sacrilege, the site of violence, the site of trauma, the site of miracle, first and foremost as the site of collective memory’s ongoing reconstruction, for the perpetrators as much as for the victims.”
Jury: Jonathan M. Reynolds, University of Southern California, chair; Carmen C. Bambach, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Seton Hall University
