A two-and-a-half-minute tribute on a cultural historian of Europe whose work has followed a single material, glass, across centuries, and asked what different societies believed a piece of it was for.
Daniel Jütte is Professor of History at New York University, and a cultural historian of Europe from the late Middle Ages to the present. His work has centred on the history of materiality, on what different substances meant, in different periods, to the people who lived among them.
His book Transparency: The Material History of an Idea (Yale University Press, 2023) traces the changing cultural meanings of architectural glass from antiquity to the present. Earlier work, including The Strait Gate: Thresholds and Power in Western History and The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians, and the Economy of Secrets, established his method: reading a single kind of object across the periods and religions that used it. The Dan David Prize honored Jütte as a cultural historian of Europe whose scholarship reads the material world as a history of belief.
Most visitors to a cathedral today look at a stained-glass window and think how beautiful. Jütte's argument is that this was not always what the window meant. In seventeenth-century England, the same object that a Catholic devotion had bought and installed became, in the eyes of a Puritan iconoclast, an idol to be destroyed. Glass, a material with several thousand years of history behind it, had been understood as a household necessity, an architectural luxury, a sign of the sacred, a sign of vanity, a proof of the wrong theology, all in different centuries and by different societies. The same substance kept meaning different things.
The film's task was to give the viewer the felt collision of those meanings. We chose the sharpest one Jütte's period offered us. A man climbing a huge ladder, at the top of a cathedral, hammer in his hand, gleefully destroying an object that other people had built thoughtfully, generations before him, and had believed was holy. That is the film's central dramatic moment. The clash of what the material was, and what it had suddenly become.
The film is designed in the spirit of the Gothic cathedrals as they looked, and the whole of it in the spirit of stained glass, the material it is about.
Each year the Foundation chooses, with the laureate, the subject of the film they are honoured for, and we turn it into script, image and motion. The laureate sees it for the first time on the evening of the prize — on the big screen, in a room full of people who have come to honour them. Afterwards the films go out on social media, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, and on the Foundation’s own site, beside the committee’s reasoning and the laureate’s interview, and some laureates carry them into their own classrooms, to show what it is they work on.
Jütte's film was the precursor to the material-first practice we have written about elsewhere. If the film is about lipstick, draw it with lipstick →