Principal Investigator: Professor David Watkins, Centre for Jewellery Research

Amount awarded: £69,170

Year of award: 2004

Present day knowledge of goldsmiths’ work at the magnificent courts of the dukes of Valois Burgundy in the hundred year period between the mid-fourteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries is based on the few extant items from the period, together with information extrapolated from painted and sculpted works, illumination, inventories and text-based descriptions. The sum of that knowledge is not extensive. It is open to different patterns of interpretation and emphasis from the few researchers working on the period.

Simulating Splendour: Virtual Modelling of Historical Jewellery research builds on innovative techniques developed by David Humphrey with earlier British Academy funding for the development and application of high-end digital modelling, animation and simulation technologies within the field of academic historical jewellery research. His methodology is based on the construction of scenarios in which digital actors clothed with digital garments wear digital simulations of jewellery items developed from primary source references. Those scenarios are animated through the application of simulated real world forces. The results of this approach yield new insights into the design of jewellery objects from the period, how and why they were sited at particular locations on the landscape of the body and how wearers interacted with the objects. The visualisation of objects, clothing, wearers and scenes as a whole are carried out using state of the art ‘unbiased’ rendering technology which simulate light by mathematical calculation based on real world physics.

Outcomes from this project have been presented at venues including the Courtauld Institute, University of London, Exeter, Kingston, Leeds, Goldsmiths College University of London, Institute d’Histoire, Paris IV La Sorbonne, Reading and Wolverhampton. Forthcoming papers will be presented at the Musée national du Moyen Age, Paris and the universities of East London and Leeds.

Key research findings from the project will be published in his chapter, ‘Complex Worlds and Individual Narratives: Personal Interaction with Jewelry in Late Medieval Northern Europe, in: Blick, S. and Gelfand, L., eds., Push Me, Pull You: Interaction, Imagination and Devotional Practice in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art, to be published by Brill Academic Press in 2009.