The Medieval Image World: Mediation and Access

This project explores how editorial design can mediate and preserve Denmark’s medieval church frescoes for current readers. Found in approximately 600 churches across the country, these wall paintings form one of Europe’s largest surviving archives of medieval imagery and offer a unique insight into how people understood, imagined, and represented the world.

The project stems from a fascination with images as carriers of collective memory and with the ways visual narratives continue to shape how we understand the world. Through editorial design, the publication investigates how historical material can be translated into a new reading experience without losing its complexity or cultural significance.

Bringing together conservator Kirsten Trampedach’s photographs of the frescoes, and selected writings by scholars including Ulla Haastrup, Axel Bolvig, Niels M. Saxtorph, R. Broby-Johansen, and Trampedach herself, the publication reinterprets generations of research within a contemporary editorial framework. The photographs present the frescoes as they appeared at the time they were documented, centuries after they were first painted, while the texts carry forward the voices and knowledge that have shaped their interpretation over time.

Rather than serving as a substitute for encountering the frescoes in their original settings, the publication is intended as an invitation to seek them out. By organizing images thematically, connections are created between recurring motifs, symbols, and narratives across different periods and locations, encouraging readers with no prior knowledge of the subject to engage with the material on their own terms.

Throughout the process, I became particularly interested in the frescoes’ visual language – their symbols, allegories, and storytelling strategies – and how many of these mechanisms remain surprisingly familiar today. Although the frescoes belong to the past, they continue to reveal something about our enduring need for images, stories, and shared ways of making sense of the world. The project is therefore both an exploration of medieval visual culture and a reflection on editorial design as a tool for interpretation, mediation, and cultural preservation.