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Colour. Shape. Space. Time. The lines we draw between medieval and modern art delineate periods, but also connect them. When we visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and look at ‘The Love Song (Le Chant d’Amour)’ (1868–77) by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, we instantly register an imagined medieval life. We can’t help but notice the armoured knight, enamoured with his love as she plays a portable organ with its bellows pressed by an angel. We might observe the quiet outline of a walled medieval city that recedes in the background. We might learn from a placard or exhibition book that the painting was supposedly inspired by a Breton lai: ‘Hélas! je sais un chant d'amour/ Triste ou gai, tour à tour’ (Alas! I know a love song/ Sad or happy, each in turn).Footnote 1 If the painting is located in time, its location is expressed through a distinctly medievalising temporality. When we stand before Marc Chagall’s ‘White Crucifixion’ (1938) at the Art Institute of Chicago, our eyes are drawn to the central figure of Christ, spotlighted, as though with divine light, from above. We might think of all the crosses and bodies of Christ in the ‘Arts of Europe: Medieval and Renaissance’ exhibit at the far corner of the building. You move to or from the Modern Wing through the other spaces of the museum, as though moving through history. But if you dwell with Chagall’s Christ, you notice his waist wrapped in a tallit. You notice the scenes of chaotic pogroms, the pillaged and burning buildings, Jewish figures lamenting and refugees fleeing by foot, carrying the Torah, or fleeing by boat en masse. You notice the host of Nazi soldiers standing in for the persecutors of a distinctly Jewish Jesus. The painting thus takes us back to the medieval, only to situate us again in the contemporary urgency of the late 1930s. When we take in Ellsworth Kelly’s ‘Red White’ (1962) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, we are drawn to the colour, the shape, the space. Description and explication feel insufficient. But I’ll try: it’s a single asymmetrical abstract shape with eight slightly curved and irregular sides, filled in with solid cadmium-esque red, the crisp edges of which are set against a clean white background. Time feels uncannily absent, or at least still. That is, until you come across the final folios of the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch, an English manuscript from around the first half of the eleventh century and currently held in the British Library under the shelf-mark Cotton Claudius B.iv. It contains an Old English translation of the first six books of the Old Testament and over 400 vibrantly coloured illustrations. Embedded in history and gracing the cover of this issue of postmedieval – the title of which already temporally frames the art in relation to the medieval and its futurity – is a close-up of one of the illustrations on folio 145v of the manuscript. Here the artist was interrupted while drawing a scene from the Book of Joshua. Remarkably, these unfinished drawings give us insight into the process itself, the way art is made over time: after the figures are roughly sketched, colour is added to form the general shapes of bodies, clothes, rivers, buildings (Johnson 2000). It becomes a kind of post-figurative abstraction. But it also does something else. I’ve always felt an eerie attraction to the parts of manuscripts that are left blank or incomplete, awaiting a planned program of illustrations or words to come. But here, it’s all the more eerie. Time feels frozen, started then stopped, but not in an anticipatory way. It is as though the freezing of time produces a work of art that could be complete, that could stand on its own. What we are left with are pure colors and shapes that seem to draw me back, as it were, to the art of Ellsworth Kelly. In a 2015 interview, he reflected on the way he ‘made drawings of things, ideas of structure,’ and explained how his art, which appears purely abstract and almost as far from figurative as possible, was often inspired by the colours and shapes he would observe around him, emerging from shadows, stairs, furniture, plants, window frames. ‘I’d like my paintings to be in the present tense,’ remarked Kelly at the start of the same interview (2015). We might pause here to ask, what would it mean for medieval art to occupy tense in the same way? Alexander Nagel offers one way to approach defamiliarising juxtapositions between medieval and modern art – juxtapositions of ‘art out of time,’ out of ‘mere historical sequence’ – proposing that ‘the point of the comparison is not merely to find a precursor or “reference” for the modern intervention; the effect of the encounter goes in both directions’ (2012, 22-23). In light of Nagel’s suggestion, the incomplete drawings of the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch invite us not to think about how those drawings look ahead in time (whether in their immediate almost-completeness or in their anticipation of future imitations), but rather to reflect on the way they exist in the present and singular moment of recognition: that is, the moment in which I – as the viewer who happens to have seen both folio 145v of the medieval manuscript and enough of Ellesworth Kelly’s art to have made some kind of phenomenologically inexplicable connection between them – stand before one or the other, absorbing their pure colour and shape in unique constellations of consciousness.