Introduction

Contrary to what Roland Barthes observed in language—where the advent of meaning renders its rustle inaudible, turning it into a utopia—in works of art, forced to engage with a più grassa Minerva , as Leon Battista Alberti put it, materiality always rustles: the advent of meaning cannot silence the rustle of matter. Here we describe the paradox that has ensnared art historians—their ‘fear of materials’—and the emergence, beginning in the 1970s and especially in the 1980s, in the work of scholars from Hubert Damisch to Monika Wagner, of an increased attention to matter and materials within the practice of art history, a tendency recently reinforced by the so-called new materialisms and anthropologists such as Tim Ingold. As contributions like those of Georges Didi-Huberman show, this heightened awareness of materiality has been intertwined with the question of the afterlife of artworks, brought to the fore and explored in different ways over the past decades. We present the chapters of this book—grouped into three parts, one more theoretical, one more strictly art-historical, and one focused on contemporary artists who have taken the problem of afterlife through materiality as their subject—in relation to that intertwining.